As the father of two young girls, Lilo & Stitch has been a mainstay in our house for years. Well, mostly Stitch, because as my daughters say, “he’s adorable.” They’ve watched the original movie and the TV series on repeat, and I’d bet we have at least a dozen Stitch stuffies scattered around the house. And ever since they saw the first trailer for this new live-action version, I kept getting asked when they could see it.
The film kicks off with Stitch, also known as Experiment 626, on the verge of being 86’d from his planet for being, well, completely nuts. After crash-landing on Earth, we meet six-year-old Lilo, played by the wonderfully spunky Maia Kealoha. She’s late for her hula recital because she stopped to feed a hungry turtle. After spotting Stitch’s spaceship plummeting to Earth, she thinks it’s a shooting star and makes a wish for one true friend.
Enter Stitch, now on the run from alien pursuers Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and Pleakley (Billy Magnussen), crashes into Lilo’s world, and the two become inseparable.
Stitch, man. Stitch is crazy. Once Lilo brings him home, the next thirty minutes are pure chaos. He crashes a wedding and steals the cake, sets a luau on fire, and somehow gets Lilo’s older sister, Nani (Sydney Agudong), fired from every job she manages to get. Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp and written by Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes, those parts are funny, but after a while, I was ready for the story to kick in. Thankfully, once Stitch realizes he needs to behave or risk being sent back to the animal shelter where he was found, things start moving. That’s when we meet CIA Agent Cobra Bubbles (Courtney B. Vance), who’s come to the island to investigate the crash and Stitch.
There are definitely some laugh-out-loud moments here. Kealoha is pitch-perfect as Lilo. Her reactions to Stitch had my girls in stitches (pun intended). Chris Sanders, who wrote and directed the original animated film alongside Dean DeBlois, returns to voice Stitch, and he’s hilarious as ever. It’s hard to make a character charming using only grunts and gibberish, but somehow, he pulls it off. The visual effects for Stitch and the aliens are top-notch and seamless.
As for the supporting cast, Magnussen is solid as Pleakley. Galifianakis, who’s usually a scene-stealer, felt like he was phoning it in. Maybe it was just the lure of an extended Hawaiian vacation.
But hey, I’m not the target audience, so let’s see what my daughters thought:
Ella (8 years old): “I loved it so much! Stitch was really funny. I give it a ten out of ten!”
Sadie (6 years old): “I was scared when they were fighting at the end, but I really liked it. Stitch was funny! I give it a thousand out of a thousand!”
