David’s Download: Lilo & Stitch and Friendship Reviews

Memorial Day Weekend brought the release of two movies about unlikely friendships: Disney’s live action remake of Lilo & Stitch and the Tim Robinson/Paul Rudd comedy Friendship. I was able to catch both films between The Drive Home episodes, and enjoyed them to varying degrees.

Let’s start with Lilo & Stitch…

I’m apathetic when it comes to live action Disney remakes, of which we seem to get two or three every year. In my opinion, a handful of the remakes have improved on the originals (Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella), whereas others have tarnished the legacy of their forebears (The Lion King). The 2025 version of Lilo & Stitch falls squarely in the middle.

While I saw the original Stitch in theaters in 2002, I don’t have a deep relationship to it. Overall, I felt like this remake retained a lot of the heart of its predecessor and offers a light, harmless time at the movies for the whole family. Disney found a gem in Maia Kealoha, who is literally the real-life embodiment of Lilo. She carries the film on her back, and there are some fun supporting turns from Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen as aliens who come to Earth to retrieve Stitch, aka Experiment 626, after he escapes captivity.

I may have enjoyed this movie even more if it weren’t for my theater’s personal Stitch, terrorizing everyone in the audience from the back row. After numerous cries and wails, I turned around in my seat and asked the child’s neglectful parents to take their kid to the lobby, but they must have been stoned out of their minds because they said, “Huh?” and barely lifted a finger. To make matters worse, it was a 9 P.M. showing on a Monday! Thought I would have avoided annoying children at that hour, but I guess some parents are too trashy to get a babysitter. I still can’t believe I was the only one who spoke up about the disturbance. As Jason would say, it was “a theater full of cowards!”

And then there’s Friendship…

I’m not 100% sure how I felt about this offbeat comedy, which follows a socially awkward marketing executive named Craig, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with his neighbor Austin, the local weatherman. What starts off as some casual hangouts with Austin develops into a weird fascination, and eventually obsession for Craig.

Friendship isn’t your ticket to a laugh-out-loud time at the movies. Rather, the comedy within is deadpan and discomfiting. I was not familiar with comedian Tim Robinson, who plays Craig, nor his brand of humor before checking out his first big screen vehicle, but apparently that is what he is known for.

Underpinning the movie is a satirical commentary on the simplicity, awkwardness, and desire for connection among straight, middle-aged men. While I don’t have a lot of friends in this demographic, I still chuckled at a lot of the jokes (e.g. the spontaneous 90’s hip-hop singalong in the garage and a certain character’s disappearance in the sewer.)

Even so, I felt the movie could have leaned more into the madness and gone batsh*t crazy. As my fellow The Drive Home critic Jose would say, “If you’re gonna go there, go there!”