The Lion King Review: 3 Ups & 7 Downs
2. Timon & Pumbaa Steal The Show
If the movie boasts any single, undeniable success, it's surely the brilliant two-hander between Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen as Simba's jovial sidekicks Timon and Pumbaa.
More than any other actors in the film, they extensively express themselves and get somewhere close to the spirit of the original characters as a result.
Eichner's wonderfully sarcastic Timon is a campy delight, while Rogen is perfectly cast as the charmingly boorish warthog Pumbaa. Hell, he even gets to do the "Seth Rogen laugh" not once, but twice.
Their banter throughout the film is naturalistic enough that it almost sounds as though ad-libbed, despite Disney clearly locking the movie's script down tight and giving the actors little-to-no input on the end product.
It's a shame that Timon and Pumbaa are really the only two characters to survive the soulless, airtight creative environment of this remake, but they do provide plenty of fun relief in the film's second half even when nothing else is really working.