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carljkirch
Reviews
Ali Baba & the Gold Raiders (1999)
Flawed but enjoyable
This animated adaptation of the classic Arabian Nights story of "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves" is objectively terrible. I'm not going to dispute that. But even though "Ali Baba & the Gold Raiders" is a bad movie, I loved it. The animation was lazy, there were times when characters would monologue to the audience, there were times when lines would be repeated several times over (case in point: towards the end of the film, one of the bad guys pretends to be a zaitun oil trader so he can beat up Ali Baba for stealing gold from the Cave of Treasure. Ali Baba keeps saying something like, "My wife is called Zaitun and she loves to cook with zaitun oil. She loves cooking with zaitun oil so much that she calls herself Zaitun. I love my wife Zaitun's cooking that uses zaitun oil."), the walkcycles were awful, for some reason the Cave of Treasure containes Oscars, Wimbledon trophies, and Olympic gold medals as well as a walkie-talkie despite being set in medieval Arabia, bad guys wear Batman T-shirts and drink Coca-Cola, etc. There was even a time when Casa Baba (Ali's brother), after forgetting the magic word to make the door of the Cave open, says something like, "Abracadabra! Abracadabra! Araghba! Osama bin Laden! (which is infinitely stranger considering this movie was made in 2002) What's the magic word?" The pacing of the film is also terrible, as some scenes are dragged out for far too long.
Despite all of these flaws, I was never bored. "Ali Baba" is only 51 minutes in length and I was constantly laughing at the laziness of the film. I think everyone should watch this movie, but maybe just once.