★★½ (2½ out of 4)
How to start with this wobbly but watchable live-action downgrade of the wonderfully hand drawn 2002 animated hit? “Lilo and Stitch” hits theaters with its mission stated right up front. “Family means no one gets left behind,” says orphaned Hawaiian girl Lilo, played by a seven-year-old package of adorable named Maia Kealoha. She can sell a stale line like nobody’s business. These non-cartoon retreads usually suck—think “Mufasa: The Lion King,” “Snow White,“ and thet mega-dumb “Dumbo”—but this one’s not nearly so egregious. Family is the target audience this Memorial weekend when kids need a distraction and parents need a distraction from kids. Everybody’s happy, right? Yeah, but don’t push it.
In House of Mouse style, Lilo is introduced as an orphan. Mom and daddy died in a car crash. Why parents bite the bullet in so many Disney frolics is a subject for another day. The gist of it is that Lilo will be sent to foster care if her teen sister Nani (Sydney Agudong) can’t cut it as a guardian. Credit the film for not shying away from themes of loss and loneliness even as it works up a sweat trying to tickle the funnybone.
Instead of therapy, Lilo bonds with Stitch, a blueish space alien who may have been engineered as a weapon of mass destruction. Voiced by Chris Sanders, who cowrote the animated original version and voiced Stitch then as now, knows just how to play a cartoon character for real. Stitch is a handful, a pyromaniac with a thing for ripping things to pieces. Not people, luckily, or we’d be pushing out of PG territory into a concerning darkness.
“Lilo & Stitch” 2025 mixes a lot of tones without a shred of subtlety. And the sci-fi stuff concerning two alien scientists, Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and Pleakley (Billy Magnussen), trying to snatch Stitch back on his own planet, feels like padding. Somehow director Dean Fleischer Camp has lost the oddball, off-the-wall inspiration he brought to his marvelous “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.” In its place is a frenetic farce that sidelines us from the relationships at the film’s core.
I’m talking about the shared grief between Lilo and her sister Nani, both struggling to survive without parents and the bond that Lilo forms with Stitch that draws sniffles for the genuine emotions it evokes between human and alien. When it stops overdoing the comedy and eases into its quieter places without the hardsell white noise that comes with straining to please everyone, the 2025 version of “Lilo & Stitch”is funny and touching in all the ways that count.
On more thing: “Stitch bad,” says the alien to Lilo, magically evoking the end of “Bride of Frankenstein” when the monster declares, “Alone bad — friend good.” It’s an indelible moment that banishes loneliness through the unlikeliest of friendships. I only wish “Lilo & Stitch” had more of them.