The New Adventures of Aladdin (2015)

The New Adventures of Aladdin arrives from France in 2015 with a premise that sounds like a hostage negotiation: two men in Santa suits, a department store, a plan to rob it, and a room full of children demanding a bedtime story. What follows is a loose, shaggy retelling of the Aladdin tale, filtered through the ambitions of a would-be rapper. It is a comedy. It knows it is a comedy. It has no other business.

The cast includes several performers of North African descent, in leading and supporting roles, which suits a story set in a vaguely Middle Eastern neverland. This is casting as common sense, not as a statement. The film does not pause to congratulate itself, and the audience is not asked to applaud. Elsewhere, the cupboard is bare. Princess Shallia exists to be romanced. The plot toys with a robbery and then declines to commit one, settling into conventional morality by the closing credits. There is no environmental sermon, no economic critique, no meditation on bodies, minds, or the writing of history. It is a fairy tale with jokes.

This is, in the end, a film about a man who wants to be rich and famous and learns, mildly, to be neither. The sequel arrived three years later, which tells us the market was satisfied. For those of us who catalogue the cultural temperature of every release, this one reads as room temperature. It offends no one, instructs no one, and improves no one. It simply tells a story to some children and goes home.