There are worse movies to take your kids to
Tired of always being on the run from angry mobs, Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) look for a place that’s so horrible, no person other than them would go there. Winding up in New Jersey, they find a haunted sanitarium that they think is perfect to start a family. They also meet an escaped mental patient named Lurch (Conrad Vernon), who they end up enslaving, I guess. Seriously, there’s no scene in this where they ask Lurch, ‘do you want to spend the rest of your life waiting on my family hand and foot.’ They just start giving him orders.
Years pass, and they have two children, Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard). One day at dinner, Wednesday asks what’s the outside world is like, to which everyone else reacts in shock. Great, it’s going to be one of those movies. Weirdly, when the fog surrounding their home clears to reveal the town built next door, everyone decides to go check it out.
There they meet Margaux Needler (Allison Janney), the host of a show where she makes homes “perfect.” She’s staked her entire business empire on redesigning a whole town called “Assimilation,” which is as if Pleasantville ate the setting of Edward Scissorhands and then threw up. One of the first things we see Margaux do is after her daughter Parker (Elsie Fisher) tries to tell her about the weird house she found, is to say something to the effect of ‘run along small child, mommy’s busy being a workaholic. Don’t become friends some weird girl named after hump day.’ As you can imagine, Margaux cannot stand how different the Addams are from everyone else and plots to get rid of them.
While Morticia remains skeptical of their new neighbors, Gomez decides to give them the benefit of the doubt. Plus, he’s busy helping Pugsley prepare for his Mazurka. A family tradition that denotes that he has finally become a man. Also helping Gomez is Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll), who sounds like that one douche (NSFW) from Sausage Party.
Blah, blah, blah, conformity is terrible. Blah, blah blah, you got to give your kids freedom to be themselves. Blah, blah, blah, anti-semanticist metaphor. It’s not a very original storyline or message, which wouldn’t be a problem if the comedy made up for it. Humor is subjective, but I found the jokes in this to be pretty weak sauce, especially in comparison to Addams Family Values, which remains the high point of Addams family films.
Now, there are a couple of bits in here I like. Like when Morticia and Gomez are showing Margaux their wine cellar, and Morticia opens a barrel, and several voices say stuff like ‘are we there yet.’ It’s a whine cellar, that actually took me a minute. Or how upon going to middle school for the first time, Wednesday thinks that it’s a prison. A comparison not without some merit.
The end of the movie sees (spoiler) Margaux outright attempts to kill the Addams using a catapult, which leads to a tense scene where all the Addams huddle together, prepared to go out as a family when their house comes crashing down on them. Except after they get rescued, because this is a family movie, it occurred to me that why should getting crushed kill any of them. They seem to survive stuff that would usually kill people. Like having a crossbow throw one ear and out the other.
After realizing that they were on the verge of killing a family, coupled with the revelation that Margaux’s installed secret cameras to go all Big Brother on them, the rest of the town turns on her. Margaux’s show ends up canceled, and nothing else bad happens to her. What? You’d think she get, I don’t know, arrested?
Then the Addams rebuild their house alongside the townspeople after it got destroyed. So it’s the same design, but now with pink paint. Except things go back to exactly the way they were before when the spirit haunting the house come back. Well, I guess the status quo isn’t just for people in high school. Wait a minute, isn’t that them conforming to the usual family aesthetic? And even before that, there’s a part where Wednesday wears new pink clothes, a gateway color, and says that this is her new look. She then goes back to wearing her classic outfit in the very next scene. (/spoiler) Way to undermine your message, movie.
The main reason I even wanted to see this movie was the great cast, but they have a notable lack of chemistry. Maybe it would have been better as another live-action film, which I’m surprised the filmmakers didn’t do.
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