Film reviews: The Phoenician Scheme | Lilo & Stitch

Lilo & Stitch (U) ★★

Wes Anderson is the most singular American filmmaker currently working, but his distinctive style sometimes gives the impression he’s retreating further and further from reality into his own hermetically sealed world of irony and whimsy. Really, though, his films are rife with human drama; it just seeps in unexpectedly in odd ways.

That’s true of his new film The Phoenician Scheme, largely thanks to Benicio Del Toro, who responds to the constrictions of the film’s mannered style by turns his character into a kind of bemused powder keg who could go off at any moment (there’s a repeated gag involving hand grenades). He plays Zsa-Zsa Korda, a business tycoon in crisis who enlists his convent-bound daughter Leisl (played by Mia Threapleton, daughter of Kate Winslet) in a quest to pull off a complicated business deal after a series of failed assassination attempts force him to confront his own mortality.

The resulting film moves at a fair clip as Anderson crams in arch gags, surreal action sequences and his usual array of kooks and crazies, none of which is likely to convert Anderson agnostics, but if you’re already on board, it’s another intriguing piece of the meticulously designed puzzle that is his work. And Del Toro really is magnificent.

First released in 2002, Lilo & Stitch was one of the last traditionally animated Disney films, a minor high point on an otherwise downward trajectory of mediocrity. Now the anarchic cartoon about a genetically engineered alien befriending a lonely six-year-old in Hawaii gets its inevitable live-action remake and the results, sadly, highlight the diminishing creative returns of this ongoing practice. It’s an odd fit for live action too, given so much of it is built around its young protagonist, Lilo.

Things that work in the animated version are harder to get across with such a young performer and the film has too many complicated digital effects to enable director Dean Fleischer Camp (who made the lovely Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) to keep things loose enough to improvise around her. There’s still plenty of slapstick humour involving the digitally animated Stitch to keep young kids happy, but with a running time approaching two hours (the original was a tight 80-minutes) you feel it dragging.

The Phoenician Scheme is in cinemas from 23 May​ ; Lilo & Stitch is in cinemas from 21 May

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