Plot: After years of living in solitude in their blissfully haunted manor, the Addams Family are discovered by a colorful, average neighborhood down the hill, the residents of which are none too happy to meet the family. A culture clash of the spookiest kind ensues, with a celebrity home makeover host hoping to get rid of the family for good.
Review: With all the superheroes, bingeable content on their parents' phones, and animated movies about yellow minions being released, I have no reason to think children will walk away from THE ADDAMS FAMILY caring at all about what they've just seen by the end of the car ride home. This new update featuring the freaky family may sport some clever gags and references to appease young ones and their parents for less than 90 minutes, but otherwise, this new take is a hollow, cobweb-filled attempt at turning the family into the next wacky, cartoon cash-earner.
While the goal is to introduce young ones to the spooky, delightfully kooky family through a series of loud physical gags, anyone nostalgic for the 90s live-action movies is also a key target. Taking things back a few years from where the show and the movies did for the sake of adding some light mythos, we’re introduced to the patriarchs of the family – Morticia (Charlize Theron) and Gomez (Oscar Isaac) – as they tie the knot in a moonlight ceremony outside a sleepy village. But just as they begin they’re run of out town by an angry mob who are not having any more Addams antics, much like an angry mob chasing a Universal monster out of a European village. After some time they meet their hulking, soon-to-be-manservant Lurch near an abandoned asylum, which they turn into their creepy, loving home to raise up young ones Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard).
Luckily, screenwriters Matt Lieberman and Pamela Pettler and directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan knew that any strength the movie could have would lie entirely in letting the family be their weird selves while caught in the wild, wonderfully grotesque shenanigans that only an animated movie can provide. Like a Looney Tunes cartoon, if the characters were trying harder to kill each other, we get to watch a cavalcade of animated set pieces give a whole new mad energy to the family. Notable examples include Pugsley chasing down his father in a rocket, Wednesday having the family tree, Ichabod, throw her brother across the property, or any number of sharp objects becoming lodged in Uncle Fester’s broad body, which leaves him unfazed.
For these reasons, let it never be said the movie doesn’t provide more than enough slapstick humor to entertain the little ones for a solid 80 minutes. Adults will perhaps get a different kind of mileage out of it – besides a nostalgia for the movies and general Saturday morning cartoon mayhem – in the many, many pop culture references that only adults would hope to grasp. Besides general meta-gags (like a seemingly-ancient Snoop Dogg song introducing the character that Snoop Dogg himself voices), adults who have dipped their toes into some classic and modern horror movies will have some fun finding the little callbacks thrown out. One scene alone has Wednesday acting out a famous moment from the Universal’s original FRANKENSTEIN, only to follow it up with a bit from 1978’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. It’s these kinds of moments I felt both proud and a little dorky laughing at to myself.
It's a shame Isaac and Theron only get to lend a small fraction of their talents to the Addams, as if any perfect casting existed, it would be these two as Gomez and Morticia. Still, they and the rest of the voice cast make the best of it, having fun and knowing what kind of movie they’re lending their voices to. Moretz and Theron perfectly encapsulate the melancholy wit of that have made their characters iconic, while Isaac earns the kooky crown as Gomez, chewing large bits of dialogue with gusto. He understands that when Gomez is at his most scene-stealing he has an Errol Flynn quality to him – dashing and heroic – but is still the kind of guy who would love to work at a mortuary. For fans of Nick Kroll’s BIG MOUTH, the actor brings a Coach Steve quality to Uncle Fester, the most absurd, and thus most likable, character in the bunch, and one of the few who is guaranteed gold whenever he opens his huge, perhaps spider-filled mouth.
Sadly, these clever moments couldn’t be brought as brilliantly to life in the visual department, bogged down by flat animation. With movies like HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 3, TOY STORY 4, and to a lesser extent, the recent ABOMINABLE, showing all the wonder and rich visuals animation can provide nowadays, ADDAMS can’t help but look cheap with a lack of refined detail in the environments and the characters themselves. The explosions look alright, I suppose.
For all the colorful gags and clever meta-references – delivered by a game voice cast – there still needs to be a story that propels them from antic to antic – and the one here feels ripped right out of the tomb of textbook children’s movie morality stories. After the movie’s setting opens up to reflect that of EDWARD SCISSORHANDS – in that the people of a cookie-cutter, brightly-lit nearby town becomes exposed to the dark castle on top of the hill, and the unique people living in it – a plan is put in action by a bubbly celebrity house flipper, Margaux Needler (Allison Janney), to run them out of town. She does this less out of being a coloful, clever villain to match the Addams', but instead exacts most of her plan through gossip on a social media app, which I’m sure reflects the easy manipulation of people through technology, but mostly makes for boring developments.
As Needler’s daughter, Parker (Elsie Fisher) becomes closer with Wednesday, who attends junior high for the sake of exploring something new and strange, their story brings out the theme of learning to accept people for who they are and what they wish to be. The smaller story arc of Gomez trying to get Pugsley reading for a special coming-of-age ceremony links to that theme as well, and very early on it becomes clear the story will never go as deep as a 25-minute cartoon. Given it’s stretched to over 3x that length, all you can do is sit back, try to enjoy some colorful oddness and wait for the movie to lazily come to its earnest message. Yes, yes we should be kind to everyone, and there are better movies to teach your children this with than THE ADDAMS FAMILY.
Whenever a reboot of a classic movie/TV series is released it's not hard to stop and ask "Why?" With poor animation and a story with a message even kids will know has been told to death, the only reason I can see to bring back the Addams' was to inject MINIONS-level gags into a name-brand property and hope nostalgia does its work on parents. But kids don't need the Addams Family, especially not with all the other, better content clamoring for their attention. What children do need, more than a new band of characters to memorize, is something to watch in dentist offices and on airplanes, and for that, THE ADDAMS FAMILY is perfect. As for you parents out there, there are a pair of 90s live-action films that should satisfy your spooky, kooky needs just fine.