Haunted Mansion (2023)
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Haunted Mansion Movie Review
Haunted Mansion is a 2023 supernatural horror comedy film directed by Justin Simien and starring LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish and Owen Wilson. It’s a reasonably diverting, but very flawed flick.
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“They’re already dead!
They’re gonna be deader“
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A woman and her son enlist a motley crew of so-called spiritual experts to help rid their home of supernatural squatters. Based on a ride of the same name, this is one of those Disney flicks where the studio obviously wanted to cash in on the success of the ride akin to ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’. The end result, though, was a box office bomb and a film that failed to connect.
My main issue with this Haunted Mansion is that it just wasn’t as fun or as kinetic as this type of project should have been. It is entertaining to a degree, don’t get me wrong, but it needed a brisker pace and a stronger narrative. The themes that it covered are so typical and clichéd that I wished that they hadn’t included them in the first place.
The characters largely worked and they are the sole reason to see this movie. They are suitably colorful and a lot of fun. LaKeith Stanfield fared the worst actually. He’s usually an excellent performer, but here he did not fit the role that itself wasn’t well written at all. Rosario Dawson was also quite forgettable.
Jamie Lee Curtis was rather bad actually and laughably so, but Jared Leto was well cast and Owen Wilson was surprisingly memorable and funny. Danny DeVito was another standout. He was typecast for sure, but he always makes me laugh, so I didn’t mind that. The highlight, though, was easily Tiffany Haddish as this psychic who turns out to be genuine, but initially she was hilariously incompetent. Most of her lines stole the movie for me.
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It’s a shame, then, that Haunted Mansion failed to make proper use of these characters and this potentially effective source material. The thrills are non-existent as the movie isn’t scary even for children. Visually, it works. I loved the designs of the ghosts and the house itself looked detailed and colorful. The magic element was especially well realized. I just wished for a stronger plot to tie all of this into a meaningful narrative.
Disney’s Haunted Mansion is a disappointing flick that is reasonably diverting, but never as creepy or as effective as it should have been. The characters are colorful and fun while its talented cast of performers did their best to make them memorable with Tiffany Haddish being the comedic highlight. The visuals were also quite nice. The problems here were its overly slow pace and weak narrative that never built any momentum at all.
My Rating – 3
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