The baffling decision on Disney’s part to put their new Haunted Mansion movie out at the end of July is one of those corporate marketing decisions I’ll never understand. It’s in the middle of a slew of other big releases it has no chance of sticking out against in the middle of summer. And it’s subject matter positions it perfectly for tapping into the family-friendly Halloween season market, of which it likely wouldn’t have much competition. Unless the studio had utterly no faith in it whatsoever, it makes no sense to release it now when they did. Already poised to be yet another failure in a year full of them, it almost certainly would have made more back later in the year.
Of course a later release date wouldn’t have solved the problems with this second movie adaptation of one of Disneyland’s most popular attractions; a movie that at one point was going to be helmed by Guillermo del Toro -yet another to add to his stack of unrealized projects. Instead it comes after years languishing in development hell through a script by Kate Dippold and Dear White People director Justin Simien. And while it is another naked attempt to simply cash in on a prominent Disney I.P. that has laid dormant for twenty years, it does have a few strong story qualities and sparks of visual ingenuity going for it. Unfortunately, it fails to engage with these in much of an effective way.
Comparisons will inevitably be made to the earlier 2003 Eddie Murphy vehicle that is nostalgically beloved by folks of my generation but is mostly bad, so it’s worth pointing out right away that the set-up for this version at least is much more promising. The plot is about a group of disparate characters brought to the Haunted Mansion, a creepy abandoned estate outside New Orleans, forced by circumstance to work together to free themselves of its haunting influence. A fairly traditional set-up for a haunted house story -bearing more than a couple hallmarks of The Haunting in fact (ironic, given one of its stars, Owen Wilson, appeared in the terrible 1999 remake of that classic). Meanwhile the emotional crux of the movie centres on the grief of protagonist Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), a ghost tours operator in mourning over the death of his wife in a car accident.
These are some smart story choices, and the creative nature of the Mansion’s effects -wherein anyone who sets foot inside is haunted by its ghosts wherever they go- is a nice excuse for assembling a misfit ensemble to engineer a found family theme as a mode of moving on from loss. And they are a charming bunch on paper: Rosario Dawson and Chase W. Dillon as a mother and son who were looking to rent the place, Owen Wilson as an enigmatic, optimistic street preacher, Tiffany Haddish as a halfway-competent medium, and Danny DeVito as an eccentric old professor with an expertise in haunted houses. There’s a lot of good contrast there in not only character types but performance sensibilities. Conceptually it works great, but in practice requires a certain level of commitment on the part of the script and the cast that is simply not there in the finished product.
There is something distinctly hollow to how the film develops both its setting and its characters and I suspect it is attached to the overall fidelity to the source attraction. The plot’s momentum is almost entirely determined by re-creations of set-pieces or bits of lore from the attraction, with only minimal character focus around it. Apart from Ben, his grieving backstory, and a late-revealed parallel situation for the kid Travis, the script isn’t much at all invested in the story potential of these other characters in spite of their complimentary nature. Scraps of manufactured dialogue and awkward jokes are thus all they have to work with. DeVito and Haddish are particularly ill-served by this, playing merely to a cliché of their screen personas -though even Wilson, closer to a highlight, struggles to feign much interest in his performance through certain sequences. The lack of enthusiasm can be felt in this, the desperation in the script to make some kind of connection through hackneyed quipping and sequences that lack cohesion; like a visit to another minimally-relevant estate for a Macguffin and a flashback meant to impart some kind of importance on the Mansion’s architect Gracey (J.R. Adduci) and crystal ball medium Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis –in a stunningly poor performance from her).
The Mansion itself is not particularly interesting visually, like its namesake an archetypal haunted house if ever there was one. And the movie’s efforts to disorient as to its contours and geography are far too broad –endless corridors or open chasms- as though Simien were trying to emulate The Shining, but without any mood. He clearly wants to go further with the scariness than Disney will allow, and does manage to introduce a couple creepy ghost designs and tame jump scare moments. But Disney put the brakes on del Toro’s concept for being too scary so it’s no surprise they allow for very little horror flavouring here. Any inventive editing and camera-work during the major supernatural sequences is also undercut by the dull effects and the pale cinematography. The earlier movie was not good, but it was shot with some spatial intent and gothic atmosphere. The only choices that seem interesting here are done simply to mimic the effect of the ride -and not often very well.
If anything in the film comes close to being earnest, it is the conversation it engages in with the subject of grief. The consistency of its interests here are spotty –Ben inquires if a séance would allow him to speak to his wife, and no sooner is this denied than the movie moves on with its other priorities. But there are a few unexpectedly mature connotations to the way that it is handled, especially in a moment late in the film between Ben and Travis –who has been all this time silently grieving his late father. Simien gives it some space and allows Ben’s catharsis an honest emotionality, but it too can’t escape the movie’s general strands of cynicism. The ultimate statement on getting over grief feels a little too clean, and in service of a very conventional resolution. It’s a shame because a context like the Haunted Mansion is a great way to explore this theme intelligently.
Haunted Mansion very well could have been an intelligent movie, but due to Disney writing it off before it even began, it never had a chance. Its bones are still pretty good, it even has a decent joke here and there, but it is so artificial and passionless that it’s hard to find respite in these. A Disney movie that no one really wanted and that the studio approached with lacklustre enthusiasm themselves –not a winning combination for any kind of good product.
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