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Lilo & Stitch (live action)

Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch is harmless but hollow family fluff that sacrifices much of the original film’s emotional heart and charm to modernity
214030
Starring
Hannah Waddingham, Billy Magnussen, Jason Scott Lee
Director
Dean Fleischer Camp
Rating
PG
Genre
Action, Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi
Release date
May 23, 2025
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Story/Plot/Script
Visuals/Cinematography
Performance
Direction
Age Appropriate
Parent Appeal
Non-Wokeness
Rating Summary
Although it's over twenty minutes longer than the original, the live-action Lilo and Stitch is significantly less developed in a number of ways (mostly its characters). However, it's still fun for kids and mildly entertaining for adults... right up until it guts the emotional core like fresh caught mahi mahi. The end will leave your jaw on the floor.

Read our Woke Elements below.

In Disney’s 2025 live-action Lilo & Stitch, Lilo Pelekai, a young Hawaiian girl, lives with her older sister Nani after their parents’ deaths. Struggling with loneliness, Lilo adopts a strange “dog” named Stitch, unaware he is Experiment 626, a fugitive alien created by Dr. Jumba Jookiba for destruction. As Stitch causes chaos in Hawaii while evading capture by Jumba and Pleakley, he bonds with Lilo, learning about love and family.

Lilo & Stitch (live action) REVIEW

Mostly sticking to the original’s story with minor changes, as Disney live action remakes go, there are much much worse than Lilo & Stitch. Unfortunately, every change that they did make only served to leech the soul out of the story, relegating this to some relatively safe summer fluff.

Zach Galifianakis and Bill Magnussen are pale reflections of the original Jumba and Pleakley, offering a few moments of weak and perfunctory slapstick that do little to enrich the film. Agent Bubbles, played by Courtney B. Vance, lacks Ving Rhames’ gravitas and presence, though that’s not as much his fault as that of the script, which gives him very little to do since his role has been split into two to make room for Tia Carrere. Carrere, who voiced Nani in the original, now plays the social worker bent on taking Lilo away from her sister. She's fine in the movie, but lacks the dynamics of Rhames' Bubbles and is rather generic– eating up time better spent on character development.

This version spends a lot more time focused on the relationship between the titular characters, which is fine, but repeated lessons in “being good” get fairly repetitive pretty quickly. Without much time given for the rest of the cast to develop their subplots, the story, which is over twenty minutes longer than the animated version, feels less. However, this version benefits from one of the cutest leading actresses since Shirley Temple.

Maia Kealoha, who plays Lilo, is an absolute delight whose bubbly effervescence and shocking commitment (for someone so young) to the film’s reality carry the movie on her tiny shoulders despite its otherwise direct-to-video quality.

Were it not for a major change in the final act (see the WOKE REPORT below), we’d comfortably recommend Lilo & Stitch as a tolerable family diversion that the kids will like and adults will occasionally chuckle at, but The Woke Mind Virus got ahold of the script leaving us no choice but to caution parents that they may need to at least talk to their kids afterwards to set them straight on what’s truly important in life.

Parental Notes

PARENTAL NOTES

Important Information for Parents

Our Parental Notes flag the material parents may want to know about before pressing play, including profanity, blasphemy, adult content, extreme violence, frightening intensity, hyper-stimulating sequences, and other family-content concerns.

UNLOCK PARENTAL NOTES.Profanity, blasphemy, adult content, extreme violence, hyper-stimulating intensity, and more.
Woke Report

WOKE REPORT

You're Only Getting Half the Picture.

This section is our site's secret sauce, and what truly separates us from the rest. If you don't read it, you haven't read our review.

Have the filmmakers chosenradical progressive messaging over story?
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James Carrick

James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.

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Leave a Review
  1. justinjacob23 May 24, 2025 at

    They seriously did that to the ending? Sheesh

    3
    Reply
  2. The Critic June 24, 2025 at

    Thanks for explaining about how they changed the ending. I can see why you were considering marking the whole film as “woke”. It is a really awful change.

    We will be sticking with animated version.

    1
    Reply

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This prevents two square // outputs or mismatched gallery states in the Share Options window. built = await buildShareImage(row, { force:true }); builtSquare = await buildShareSquareImage(row, built.cycle_image_url || '', built.poster_url || '', { force:true }); if (!built || !built.image_url) { throw new Error('Landscape share build failed.'); } if (!builtSquare || !builtSquare.image_url) { throw new Error('Square share build failed.'); } } else { built = await buildShareImage(row); } var shareUrl = built.share_url; var postUrl = (row.getAttribute('data-post-url') || '').trim() || shareUrl; var postTitle = (row.getAttribute('data-post-title') || '').trim(); if (!postTitle) postTitle = 'this'; var shareKind = (row.getAttribute('data-share-kind') || 'critics').trim().toLowerCase(); var upperTitle = postTitle.toUpperCase(); var lineTwo = (shareKind === 'audience' || shareKind === 'audience-teaser' || shareKind === 'audience-question') ? 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'Audience share options' : ((shareKind === 'ratings' || shareKind === 'ratings-admin' || shareKind === 'ratings-question') ? 'Ratings share options' : 'Critic share options'); window.__wiowLastShareOptionsContext = { row: row, heading: heading, win: previewWin }; var shown = renderShareOptionsWindow(previewWin, built.image_url, (builtSquare ? builtSquare.image_url : ''), shareUrl, heading); if (!shown) { var copied = false; if (navigator.clipboard && window.isSecureContext && navigator.clipboard.writeText){ try { await navigator.clipboard.writeText(shareUrl); copied = true; } catch (copyErr) {} } if (!copied) { var ta = document.createElement('textarea'); ta.value = shareUrl; ta.setAttribute('readonly', 'readonly'); ta.style.position = 'fixed'; ta.style.opacity = '0'; document.body.appendChild(ta); ta.focus(); ta.select(); ta.setSelectionRange(0, ta.value.length); copied = !!document.execCommand('copy'); ta.remove(); } } } if (statusEl) statusEl.textContent = (platform === 'copy') ? 'Ready.' : ''; } catch(err){ if (previewWin && !previewWin.closed) { previewWin.close(); } if (statusEl) statusEl.textContent = (err && err.message) ? err.message : 'Could not share.'; } }, true); })();