Thank God for Will Smith.

The beats of Disney’s new live action remake of Aladdin are all pretty much unrevised and familiar from the 1992 animated classic. A street urchin named Aladdin steals food and gets chased through the streets by a royal guard; then he saves a princess disguised as a civilian, and gets wrapped up in a cute tale of love, loyalty, a treacherous Grand Vizier named Jafar, and a rambunctious blue genie with a few show-stopping tunes up his manacled sleeves.

But despite its familiarity, something is amiss in Guy Ritchie’s soapy, bland rehash. The original Aladdin was just over an hour and a half long. The new one is a sleepy 128 minutes—which means that you can sense when the movie is dragging and missing its previously well-honed marks. When you’re wondering why the songs and pictures onscreen just don’t seem to pop the way they once did; when you can’t quite figure out what it is that the new film’s flesh-and-blood stars, Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott, seem to lack compared to their animated counterparts—don’t worry: it isn’t just you. Disney’s recent effort to cash in on brand loyalty by remaking its most legendary animated films as overlong, live-action snorefests was misguided from the start, and Aladdin is simply more proof of that.

That is, until Smith shows up—taking up the Genie’s mantle from the incomparable Robin Williams. It isn’t so much that he saves the movie; sinking ships can’t be saved. But their passengers can—and in this case, Smith is the lifeboat leading us to a more pleasurable film, one where it doesn’t so much matter that the sets look cheap, to say nothing of the CGI keeping Smith’s head plastered on a floating blue body.

None of that stuff rankles as much when Smith is around, because Genie — as was the case in 1992 — is the best thing in the movie. He’s the only character with wit, the only one whose heart isn’t wrapped up in an attractive but straightforward case of puppy love (though the new movie does its damnedest to change that). He’s the only character whose inner life seems to count for something, and whose fate — whether or not he’ll ever be free of the slavery of being a genie — carries genuine suspense.

Smith takes the role, which, as written, still probably owes too much to the Williams original, and does what he can with it — cornily so, though anyone who follows him on Instagram should expect as much. Most of the songs in this new Aladdin are copped from the original, as expected, and no one will blame you if you doze through the movie until “Friend Like Me” and “Prince Ali” pop up. Aladdin is technically a musical, but Ritchie’s approach to these tunes is only good when it’s copying the original’s gags. But even as the song and dance numbers are, like the rest of the movie, buried in the physical and logical constraints of live-action, Smith still has fun with them. His take on “Prince Ali” has hints of Smith’s own “Gettin’ Jiggy With It” era — meaning you’ll laugh — and his dialogue is peppered with all varieties of sass and dad humor.

As I said: Thank God. Because nothing else about this movie works. The 1992 Aladdin was an Alan Menken/Tim Rice/Howard Ashman collaboration, one of the high points of the Disney Renaissance. It is consummately strange that in 1992, an enthralled American public went to see an animated blockbuster based on a Middle Eastern folk tale — which, by the way, came with its own compromises. Roger Ebert once pointed out that most of the Arab characters in the original “have exaggerated facial characteristics—hooked noses, glowering brows, thick lips,” whereas “Aladdin and the princess look like white American teenagers.”

It’s apparent that few lessons were learned in the making of this new movie—which, with its American accents and Glee vibe, is even more pitched to an American audience that demands international cultures meet us where we are, rather than the other way around. Massoud’s charmless Aladdin comes off as a Zack Morris wannabe but without the swagger — until Smith shows up and works his magic to manufacture an actual personality for not only the character, but the actor.

Scott’s Jasmine is more interestingly written this time around, but only on the surface. Rather than being a bored princess chilling with her tiger and waiting for a decent marriage, she’s an ambitious young woman who thinks she, not whoever she marries, should be the heir to her father’s throne as sultan. The movie has its heart in the right place, but the follow-through is embarrassing: a new song in the form of a banal girl power anthem that springs out of nowhere and throws the movie out of whack, expanding its runtime unconscionably — and yet, somehow, still leaving Jasmine as vague as she was before all the hoopla.

Aladdin was always about its supporting cast, so whatever. You want the love story to work; you want “A Whole New World” to really kick you in the gut with an overdose of romantic feeling. It doesn’t, but that’s fine—because waiting in the wings, there’s a talking parrot, a magic carpet, a genie, and a villain who, in the original, came off like a dark-hearted Prince impersonator. Aladdin and Jasmine’s romance is nice enough, and their songs earn the space they’ve burrowed into our collective brain. But their plot still mostly meant to be a beautiful scaffolding for personality that gets squeezed in at the margins. (Kudos to Marwan Kenzari’s soft-spoken, eerie Jafar, the second best thing in the film.)

Let’s be honest. People: they just aren’t as fun to watch as cartoons. They simply aren’t as, well, animated. They don’t swoon with the same larger-than-life feeling; their surroundings — actual buildings, actual sand and dirt — don’t pop with the same texture or beauty, not even in the best hands. That’s doubly true if we’re comparing them to some of the best hand-drawn animation in the business, which Aladdin — to say nothing of Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and the other Disney features that have been reduced to dull remakes in recent years — had in spades.

It’s a shame that the most essential animation studio in the world — which is now the most powerful studio in the world, full stop — doesn’t seem to remember what makes its own movies worth watching. How could it be that Disney, of all companies, doesn’t understand why we watch cartoons? But never mind. There’s money to make, and I don’t doubt that Aladdin will make its share—though it’d be telling if it doesn’t.

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