“Haunted Mansion”?
Haunted Franchise, more like.
Disney’s hardly scary family movie is the studio’s second attempt at turning its 53-year-old theme park ride into a film after the execrable 2003 effort starring Eddie Murphy.
Running time: 122 minutes. Rated PG-13 (some thematic elements and scary action.) In theaters July 28
Twenty years later, the reboot directed by the talented Justin Simien (“Bad Hair”) is at least better than that aughts Hollywood horror show, if somehow 32 minutes longer.
It’s even almost good.
But waffling Disney can’t decide if it wants this thing to be a quirky and fun but unsettling movie like “Beetlejuice,” with some real guts and creativity, or another schlocky ad for a Disney World FastPass.
At times Simien’s film is surprisingly dark and emotionally honest, while at others it’s kitschier than “The Country Bear Jamboree.”
When “Haunted Mansion” gets too silly — Jamie Lee Curtis cashing a check as the floating head of Madame Leota in a crystal ball, Owen Wilson as a priest sweet-talking a bunch of centuries-old ghosts, CGI that was state-of-the-art in 1998 — we totally stop believing in the story.
How frustrating, because there are glimmers of promise.
One is the excellent lead, LaKeith Stanfield (“Get Out,” “Judas and the Black Messiah”), as Ben, an astrophysicist turned New Orleans haunted house tour guide. Pretty much Scully from “The X-Files,” he doesn’t buy into the supernatural product he’s selling, even though he once invented a camera with the power to snap images of spirits.
“Ghosts don’t exist!,” he shouts at tourists. “Life is dirt! We’re all dirt!”
Maybe ghosts don’t exist, but cash does.
When Ben is offered $2,000 by Father Kent (Wilson) to come to the sprawling home of Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase Dillon, endearing and funny) to help exorcise some ghouls, he gladly takes the job.
Why did a young single mother buy a giant, cobweb-covered, off-the-beaten-path, crumbling manse with hardly any working electricity? She wants to open a bed and breakfast. Yeah, sure.
Doubting Ben leaves with his pay almost as soon as he arrives only to discover that a real ghost has followed him home bellowing “RETURN!” That’s when he learns that the mansion will haunt anybody who enters it forever, no matter where they run. So to stop the spooks, he’s gotta evict Casper and Co.
Aiding in the spectral fight are Bruce (Danny DeVito), a wacky Tulane professor, and Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), an easily annoyed medium.
Other than Stanfield, who becomes unexpectedly deep as his backstory is revealed, Wilson and DeVito are the MVPs. Wilson’s live-and-let-live priest is a perfect fit for the actor’s used car salesman dryness, and DeVito is his usual dynamo self. The duo get a lot of laughs.
Haddish, however, has landed a role with the comedic potential of Whoopi Goldberg’s Oda Mae Brown from “Ghost.”
But while Harriet can summon the dead during a seance, the actress can’t summon her hilarity from 2017’s “Girls Trip.” She has yet to do so in any movie since that hit.
To play the evil Hatbox Ghost, called Crump, Jared Leto’s face has been altered by special effects to appear like gaunt, gray, skeletal demon. I’m not sure why the filmmakers went through all the fuss. All the “Morbius” actor needed was a bit of powder and he’d be good to go.
The Hatbox Ghost, sad Disney superfans will know, is a feature of the Disneyland and Disney World ride, just like Madame Leota. The cheap green hologram look of the spirits in the movie is likely meant to evoke the ballroom scene of the attraction.
There is a lesson there for Disney.
When they built a film franchise from another of its classic rides, “The Pirates of the Caribbean,” the same year as the awful first “Haunted Mansion,” the studio made a string of hit movies that bore no resemblance whatsoever to some creaky, animatronic singing seafarers from the 1960s.
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