Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion, with the bright purple and radiant turquoise vapor trails of whatever smoke machine was used during production, handily invokes the campiness of the iconic Disneyland attraction, if not its kinetics. But while several set pieces move along with surprising alacrity and humor, Katie Dippold’s script drowns in exposition and lore-building, at times drawing distracting comparison to her work on the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot.
In New Orleans, Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) is drunkenly leading ghost tours in the wake of his invention of an astral spectrometer, which derailed his career as an astrophysicist. Ben is also struggling to accept the sudden death of his wife, Alyssa (Charity Jordan), and has sworn off paranormal investigating. But soon he’s roped back in, at the behest of Father Kent (Owen Wilson), after a single mother, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), and her son, Travis (Chase W. Dillon), move into a mansion outside the city and discover that it’s occupied by a sea of dead people.
Haunted Mansion settles into an enjoyable groove after its clunky setup, and in no small part thanks to the Ocean’s Eleven-style camaraderie shared by its cast of comedy heavy-hitters. Haddish, clad in a magnificent Antebellum gown and wearing impossibly long nails, amusingly ping-pongs between extremes as psychic Harriet—intimate with Ben when he’s lost in grief only to quickly and delightfully indulge the mega-theatrics of a low-rent medium like Miss Cleo.
Elsewhere, Danny DeVito, as Tulane history professor Bruce Davis, spends a solid portion of the film pants-less, raving about haunted mansions like a teenager attending ComicCon for the first time. And Wilson exudes a characteristic warmth and charm, meaning that you can’t help but trust Father Kent even when it becomes clear that he has ulterior motives.
With its slow zooms, rack focuses, and twisting corridors, Haunted Mansion confidently nods to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill. But the film’s attempts at pathos are too flimsy, in part because the underwritten nature of Dawson’s role doesn’t lend credibility to the budding romance between Gabbie and the tight-jawed Ben. And while there are some neat practical effects, the CGI ones make it feel as if the film went into production around the same time as Eddie Murphy’s 2003 movie version.
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