The Addams Family Movie Review
The Addams Family is a new animated version of Charles Addams’s original characters. This time voiced by talent such as Charlie staring an Oscar Isaac and in this film The Addams family lives in a scary haunted mansion on the top of the hill. Constantly surrounded by smog clouds and lightning.
But when the home improvement show comes to their town. The host of that show realizes that the Adams family mansion is quite the ugly thing to your average person and she wants to get them out of there so her show can succeed and she can sell all of the houses in this town.
And so to do that she has to turn the town’s people against the Adams family. What’s always been so charming about these characters. That all of them prefer dark things, they like grotesque humor they have an obsession with death in sickness and all kinds of things that most of us are afraid of they love.
Their idea of a happy day is a cloud-filled thunderstorm and a house that talks to them. and in that way, this film maintains that aspect of the characters but it’s definitely a movie aimed more at children and so like the original films from the nineties does R. P. G. 13 and this film is interested in pushing those boundaries at all. Definitely a movie aimed at kids and families although.
It still does have some of that dark humor. It’s more like bugs and slime and Nickelodeon style dark humor. And those parts of this film really work for me. I was looking forward to seeing it because to me this is sort of like the start of the official Halloween movie season. I’m doing nothing but watching horror movies right now at home. So I was getting ready to see a movie like this in the theater.
The scary stuff about it to the dark evil mansion and the ghosts and all that kind of stuff. The trappings of the film I love. The story and the direction I didn’t love. This is a surprising doll movie. That I could actually see some kids getting bored by. Usually when I review a kid’s movie I oftentimes say “if you’re an adult this may not work for you but young kids will probably be mesmerized by it, because it’s a movie that’s happening on a giant screen theatre and feel special because of that” But I can actually see young kids asking their mom when the movie’s going to end. Because the movie takes a while to get interesting and it also goes all over the place.
There’s a lot of storylines happening in this movie for one. The young kid Pugsley has this ceremony that happens when he’s 13. Every one of the Adams family does it. It seems to involve a sword fight of some kind displaying your ability with a sword. It’s never really clear what the kid has to do. Because he’s rarely ever shown being trained for it.
They just talk about it a lot and so it feels like a lot of wasted baggage. And eventually realized its true purpose for being in the movie. which I guess I won’t spoil if you want to see the film. It’s to create something else later and it just feels like a lot of wasted time. Eventually, Wednesday voiced by Chloe grace Moretz goes to junior high and gets involved with the kids there.
That’s probably my favorite aspect of the whole movie, it was Wednesday’s back and forth of how she wanted to act with her parents. She kind of wants to shock her mother so by doing that she wears normal girl clothes and her mom is like terrified by what she sees and that’s viewed as The Addams Family teenage rebellion that I thought was really clever and I enjoyed her storyline the most I would say.
But what really drags the film down is this home improvement show and its host. She’s the main villain of the film and I found her very stereotypical and on interesting for this type of character in a kid’s movie. She’s a power-hungry villain who is putting on a show for the public but behind the scenes, she’s really doing something else.
And I’ve seen that so many times in these types of movies. It’s not what I go to Adam’s family movie for. I just want to see this family do really creepy macabre. And I want to be entertained by it. But it goes away from them so much that it almost felt like the movie was afraid to just be entirely about The Addams Family.
The other big problem I have with this movie is that doesn’t really feel like it understands their core basis of these characters which is extreme acceptance of the weird. The film seems to be letting us in as an outsider. Like we’re not already on their side. Like we’re sort of on the side of the television host. And we have to be slowly inched into the weirdness of The Addams Family. Initiated in away. but I was ready from the opening scene so I don’t know why the film trades them in away. It doesn’t seem as accepted of weirdness as its message seems to be.
Unfortunately, this felt more like a TV movie than a theatrical film. I could see this playing on Nickelodeon one night Sir Cartoon Network. It doesn’t really feel like a movie made for theaters. I wanted to love this movie or at least really enjoy it, but I don’t think it understood its message fully which was at times very heavy-handed there’s certainly some real-world implications to what goes on during the third act that you could apply to today and a lot of what we see on the news.
And some of that well important to learn when you’re a kid just felt not subtle. And I think even young kids are going to pick up on certain things in the film and maybe be like “really like that was just really heavy-handed wasn’t a mom?” and mom’s “like yeah it is pretty heavy-handed”. In regards to a family Halloween themed entertainment I would recommend the hotel Transylvania films over this was unfortunately bland and nowhere near as funny or as darkly inspired as it could have been.
I’m giving the Adams family a C. what I’m really excited about is our seventh annual Halloween special. We’re planning that right now. Thank you so much as always for reading my review. Wait for me with another Movie Review.
