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Saccharine and Thematically Stunted, IF Lacks the Potential it's Article Implies

What if… a mediocre Pixar concept was made as a (mostly) live-action movie?
Despite the ambiguity of its minimalist title -which has become a bit of cliché lately in the horror genre- John Krasinski’s IF is a stark departure in tone from that pair of Quiet Place movies that put him on the map as a profitable Hollywood director in recent years, for good or bad. Perhaps out of a desire to demonstrate range, it is an egregiously wholesome family fantasy comedy that involves a ton of colourful animated characters interacting with a child protagonist. But it and his previous movies do have one thing in common: a driving idea that is more compelling than the movie itself.
Maybe that’s not fair to A Quiet Place, a movie I liked, but it certainly is for IF, which takes a solid kids movie premise and turns out maybe the third or fourth best variation on it. It is a story about Imaginary Friends -who insist on being called IFs, and the twelve year-old girl who can see them after moving to New York City where her father is undergoing heart surgery. Bea (Cailey Fleming) lost her mother to cancer a few years prior, making the situation with her father even more tenuous for her -though she refuses to show it. Indeed she carries herself in a fairly grown-up manner as a way of getting through the ordeal. And one day, while staying in her grandmother’s apartment she happens upon a strange-looking creature that apparently lives in the building with a man called Cal (Ryan Reynolds). Bea learns that this and other bizarre entities she sees are IFs looking for new children to bond with after having been forgotten by their original kids.
The two main IFs are a giant purple fuzzy thing called Blue (voiced by Steve Carrell) and a butterfly-like rubber hose-stlye woman called Blossom (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge). There’s clearly some intent in how they represent different forms of animation, with Blue as a modern bubbly Disney/DreamWorks creation and Blossom as a relic of the oldest format of cartoon, in relation to the kids that invented them. I wish Krasinski had gone a step further and actually animated Blossom and several other IFs in a hand-drawn style though. The aesthetic differences don’t mean so much when they’re all on a similar plane of dimensionality, and 3D creatures don’t mimic effectively that vaguely Roger Rabbit impression that Krasinski is clearly going for in his secret world of IFs.
That said, there definitely is a tangibility gap between these and the human characters, though it’s clearly not an artistic one. I talk about the believable efficacy of CG effects a lot, but this movie does itself no favours by putting its patently unreal characters in real environments in relation to people, with which they don’t interact at all believably. A part of this is less the visuals though and more the performances. With Reynolds, it’s mostly expected -his archetype is one that never feels much invested in the realities he is a part of, and here it's no different. His above-it-all aloofness feels very mechanical in a movie that otherwise doesn’t seem to warrant it. The other performer who spends most of their time acting with CG puppets, Fleming, is putting in a little more effort -and does play it believably in isolated moments; but she struggles too to honestly convey that relationship as anything more than a series of reactions and responses to nothing.
Her character Bea spends the movie dividing her time between concern over her dad (played by Krasinski himself) -who is irresponsibly laissez-faire about the whole surgery thing- and engagement with Cal to connect the IFs with their original kids, once those former kids have been identified. I compared the movie earlier to a Pixar flick and it very much ascribes to that company's formula where it pairs its whimsy and colourful creations with a more grounded coming-of-age subject matter. It's got the flow of an Inside Out or Turning Red, but in its focus on these childhood imaginary friends and their relationships to kids it most consciously resembles the Toy Story series. Yet while those movies are frequently about the importance of growing up and moving on, IF seems to have the opposite moral. While Krasinski is ostensibly going for some message on the value in holding on to a certain childhood innocence and wonder into adulthood, imaginary friends prove an ineffectual conduit -being something far less ubiquitous than the movie makes out. There are moments the movie appears to encourage borderline perpetual adolescence, even as the IFs' retirement is a major part of the narrative. Remembering their imaginary friends is the only moment of joy/inspiration that these adults can experience.
And it's not uncommon for movies aimed at kids to cast adults as soulless miserable figures for having outgrown the fun of imagination. Kids love to have their own senses of freedom and autonomy reflected back at them. So I understand the impetus here to convey the necessity for a spirit of magical childhood whimsy in adults, but not only does the film's messaging cast this in a regressive light, but the film suffers from a wider demographic ambition. IF may be a rare G-rated mainstream movie in 2024, but it feels like it's aiming for adults as well as children with the ways it incorporates Reynolds and its celebrity cameo voice cast, and more sophisticated references -it's both obvious and delightfully charming that Bea's grandmother (Fiona Shaw) is seen watching Harvey at one point. But the movie can be very saccharine at times, which in addition to its juvenile sensibilities around things like growing up and adulthood, makes it alienating for mature audiences, while not speaking authentically to kids either.
I saw IF in a theatre full of both, and the movie elicited maybe seven or eight widespread laugh moments across its 100-plus minute runtime. What was much more prevalent was the general sounds of shuffling in seats, whisperings to each other, and kids or parents repeatedly leaving and coming back into the theatre. This was not a movie that consistently held anyone's attention. The second-act set-piece at the IF home run by a kindly old teddy bear voiced by the late Louis Gossett Jr. was the most boisterous part of the movie -it was also of course near fully-animated. The last act however is beset by a climactic twist that the movie had been forecasting since Bea's very first meeting with the IFs, and which detracts from its effort at an emotional impact. 
IF is a movie struggling to capture an audience, with a story and rule-set that has all of the markers of strong satisfying kids movies without any of the credibility or thoughtfulness. Proof of the limitations of Krasinski's storytelling and a poor way of holding over the Reynolds crowd until the next Deadpool movie.

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