Addams Family 2 misses the funny thing about the spooky and eccentric family

The second animated Addams Family The movie has great shoes to fill, but they are not the shoes of its mediocre 2019 predecessor. The target audience won’t remember this, because they probably weren’t born at that time. But in 1991, when the Addams family first moved beyond its comic book origins and the subsequent 1960s TV show and turned into a feature film, it was a huge success, quickly followed by a sequel. From 1993 Addams Family Values It didn’t work out as well as the first movie, but it provided a model for that great rarity, the exceptional sequel to the comedy. The second live action Addams Family it’s shorter, smarter, and funnier than the first film, and it particularly delves into the character of Wednesday Addams, played by a young Christina Ricci.

In fact, Addams Family Values it’s probably one of the main reasons that much of the Addams family material since then has focused on Wednesday. On the old TV show, she wasn’t much more than a funny and stern childish novelty act. But since then it has become the center of a wretch Broadway adaptation, to popular web series ripped off YouTube for copyright issues, a forthcoming Netflix series directed by Tim Burton, and now animated films, where the voice of Chloë Grace Moretz. But by concentrating on Addams’ eldest son, the new Addams Family 2 It exposes how clumsy and wrong your opinion is on Wednesday, and what animated films about family in general are wrong.

Like Addams Family Values, Addams Family 2 make the smart decision to remove the Addams from their natural habitat. Leaving his creaky mansion makes for less flashy art direction, but stronger story potential. Whereas the previous sequel sent Wednesday and Pugsley to an upbeat summer camp and placed Uncle Fester in a loveless marriage to a perky gold digger (“Cakes?” Morticia asks with silent, withering disdain as she examines her new home), the new movie sends them on a cross-country vacation.

Gomez (Oscar Isaac, voice cast MVP) is convinced Wednesday is drifting away from the family, though why he believes that given Wednesday’s characteristic icy demeanor is not adequately explained. Instead of giving her space, you decide you can bring her back into the fold with an up-close motorhome ride. (That’s remarkably close to the central dynamic in the recent Netflix animated movie. The Mitchells vs. The machines.) Still, risky motivations aside, this is a good framework for a Addams Family Movie: Take them on all kinds of totally American and decidedly non-Goth hotspots, and force them to interact with more traditional tourists. Sounds like fun.

Some parts of the movie deliver on this promise. Gomez gets excited about the bleak prospect of going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and despairs because they don’t sell barrels locally; he has to buy “300 pickles” to get them for his family. Pugsley wreaks havoc in the Grand Canyon, attempting to enhance the majesty of nature with explosives. But even those moments don’t really reflect the Addams’ ghoulish sensibilities. Filmmakers Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon, and Laura Brousseau simply reimagine them as generators of insanity for all intents and purposes. Naive faith in his own macabre tastes is utterly lacking here.

That is especially true on Wednesday. Addams Family 2 He begins competing in the school science fair with an elaborate attempt to infuse his goofy Uncle Fester with the intelligence of an octopus. (It feeds one of the film’s few appropriately gruesome threads of execution, where Fester begins mutating into a tentacled creature.) The mad science angle makes sense, but Addams 2 She continues to press Wednesday as a kind of haughty genius barely tolerating the lower intellects around her, while feeling constrained by her position as a teenager. Basically, it’s been reconfigured into Stewie since Family man.

Could this work on Wednesday? Perhaps, more or less, with just the right degree of deadpan morbidity. In this movie, however, he actually dilutes it. After all, there is no shortage of megalomaniacal and / or resourceful cartoon characters, especially children. Addams Family Values draws a sharp and fun line between Wednesday’s antisocial tendencies and the punishing hegemony of so many childhood activities: her resistance to the joy of summer camp (and a whitewashed play about the first Thanksgiving) aligns her with others. misfits.

On Addams Family 2, both the characterization and the vocal performance of Moretz have a hollow tone of almost soft relationality. His discomfort with traditional affection feels like a joke, where Ricci made it a crucial element of his being. Although Pugsley is less central to the narrative, he is also affected by the normal antics of children. Here, he has a subplot where he tries to learn how to impress girls, and somehow his unattractiveness to them is not tied to his ghoulish tendencies, so much as to being a jerk.

This whole affair underscores how cleverly the Addams clan was portrayed in those live-action films of the 1990s, and how deceptively difficult it can be to bring them back to life, even in the seemingly ideal medium of animation. Oscar Isaac has a grip on Gomez’s goofy ringleader, and Charlize Theron has the right tone of voice for Morticia. But the characters do not coalesce as a family unit. The movie’s idea of ​​juxtaposing the creepy and the wacky is to make Lurch, the subverbal butler who resembles Frankenstein’s monster, unexpectedly break into a sharp rendition of “I Will Survive.” Rather than figuring out how to survive in the “normal” world as its inimitable selves, the movie turns the Addams characters into another batch of lovable, all-fair-play cartoon characters.

Of course, adult fans who fondly remember Addams Family Values are not the target audience of Addams Family 2. (Full disclosure: my 5-year-old daughter really enjoyed it.) But many kids watched and enjoyed live-action movies back in the day, and the Hotel transylvania Movies already exist, filled with friendly monsters and more animated animations. So why do a series of Addams Family cartoons that echo other existing franchises and that do not seem to understand this clan or what is funny about them? Addams Family 2 feels like the latest revenge from those maddeningly gleeful camp counselors from Addams Family Values: Finally, the adventures of the Addams are reinvented as an overly cute mandatory diversion.

Addams Family 2 debuts in cinemas and digital rental services such as Amazon and Voodoo October 1st.