Needs more crazy and scary

The macabre cartoons of Charles Addams began to appear in The New Yorker in the 1930s, and continued in the pages of the magazine for the next 50 years, delivering cheerfully morbid one-panel gags on murder, monsters, and magical curses. Beheadings were a favorite topic, as was a Gothic group known simply as the Addams family, named after their creator. They played with crossbows, poured hot oil on singers, guillotined dolls, stole stop signs, and loved the gloomy weather. It’s only go on television in 1964 that they’ve acquired names, personalities, and a catchy theme song (“They’re Scary and They’re Crazy / Mysterious and Scary”, and so on), not to mention a family of rivals in the drab suburb of Munsters . There were animated series, Scooby doo crossovers and TV specials, but the final interpretations, by consensus, are the 1991 sympathetic and funny Addams Family film and its sequel, Addams Family Values, who both enjoyed an excellent cast and a good dose of grotesque.

Which brings us to The Addams Family 2, the largely apathetic follow-up of the unforgettable Addams Family animated film released two years ago. As always, we have the Addamses: loving parents Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron); children Mercredi (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Javon “Wanna” Walton); Stupid, roly-poly Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll); the giant, spooky butler Lurch (co-director Conrad Vernon); and batty grandmother (Bette Midler). The character designs are ugly (Wednesday, for one, has an eggplant-shaped head) and the animation is mostly uninspired, but the basic idea of ​​the Addams – that they are, in fact, a more loving and well-adjusted family than the average American household — is here. What is missing, among other things, is the black humor that is the whole reason for the Addams family.

Instead, the characters breakdance, lip-sync with pop songs, and generally do the sort of things characters do in generic, mass-produced family movies. A good example of missed opportunities is The Premise, in which the Addams go on vacation to bond with family. With the disembodied hand known only as Thing behind the wheel, they load an oversized steampunk hearse from a camper van and set off on a road trip across the country. This in itself is a good idea; America is nothing but a nation of weird tourist traps, and it’s easy to imagine the Addams feeling right at home in the Winchester Mystery House, the Mütter Museum, or the House On The Rock. . Addams Family 2, however, sends them to visit Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. The result looks even duller than it looks. (The more cynical might conclude that these types of oversized, well-lit environments are probably much cheaper to model and animate.)

The messy sitcom awkwardly juggles an assortment of B and C storylines. Brainy Wednesday, redesigned as a less fun Lisa Simpson, suspects she has been adopted; Pugsley tries to impress the girls; Grandmother, left to her own devices, throws a noisy party at the mansion. There’s a Silicon Valley tech assistant named Cyrus Strange (Bill Hader) in the mix, and a huge amount of filler, mostly in the form of musical numbers and montages, involving the two overplayed oldies (“Jump Around,” “I Will Survive”) and the original pop-rap that no one would listen to willingly. That leaves most of the gruesome antics to Uncle Fester, the one character everyone seems to have had fun animating; filled with octopus genes on Wednesday for a science fair project, it spends most of the film transforming into a sprawling monstrosity.

Those occasional kid-friendly body horror slapstick injections only serve to highlight the laziness of the rest of the movie – no one is actually saying, “Well, this just happened ”, but given the quality of the writing, they might as well. Since we live in an age of hyperinflation of franchises, there is, of course, more Addams Family contained in the pipeline; Netflix is ​​reportedly planning a show that will play some sort of psychic teen sleuth on Wednesday, edited by Tim Burton. Burton’s perspective today in Dark shadows the mode may not look very promising, but it will probably be better than the Cousin ItThe origin story or the Dark Lurch reboot we’ll have two or three years from now.