If you live in a state with legal gaming and want to see a literalized representation of Disney’s approach to turning its theme parks into major motion picture events, just head down to your local casino and post up at one of the hold ‘em or blackjack tables or the bar, and focus your attention on the sweatiest, cockiest son of a bitch in the room. You’re liable to see a few different things: Either he’ll lose everything he’s got and wind up with a seafood buffet consolation prize, or he’ll get a nice talking-to from the pit boss about his card-counting skills, or he’ll drink too much and wind up getting thrown out after saying some genuinely inflammatory shit about Daniel Jones after the Giants quarterback throws another ill-timed pass into double-coverage. Now, gambling addiction is no joke, but there’s always one thing at the core of it that keeps people pathologically plunging money into risky situations: The memory of a grand victory. After failed attempts like Mission to Mars (a good movie I didn’t realize was based on a theme park ride until sitting down to write this) or The Country Bears, Disney hit it big. Pirates of the Caribbean remains one of their most unlikely-on-paper successes, and it is by far the most difficult to properly replicate, especially in the studio’s overproduced present. Had whatever Disney committee been in place back in 2003, there’s a decent chance that annoying middle schoolers all across the country wouldn’t have shouted, “But why’s the rum gone?” at every turn. The limitations of that magic touch appeared no less than a few months later when Eddie Murphy’s The Haunted Mansion failed to ignite audience interest and critical approval like Gore Verbinski’s Pirates did. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying once a new group of Disney brass takes up the corner office and tries to find new sources of intellectual property to mine. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old mouse?
Apparently, the answer to that question is “Every two years until we finally get bought by Apple or something.” Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion (apparently, the “the” was the thing that kept the Murphy movie from unparalleled box office success) is cast much in the mold of Jaume Collet-Serra’s Jungle Cruise, although the cult-of-personality that comes along with the Rock in the leading role is thankfully missing here. The pair share classic Hollywood inspirations, and where that prior film aped The African Queen for all it was worth, Haunted Mansion serves up equal parts The Haunting and Arsenic and Old Lace. Collet-Serra and Simien are both R-rated horror guys (check out Bad Hair for an example of that) working in an inherently limited capacity in making all-ages scary movies, but at least Simien wasn’t served with a dictate demanding that he make this one into a genuine action feature. As such, he’s able to craft enough of an appealing and amusing comedy that, thanks to the goodwill of its cast and the occasionally clever bit of writing, comes far closer to what I imagine Disney was hoping for when they greenlit this project. Yet the film is too keyed into another expectation — to make it a recognizable House-of-Mouse spectacle, full of Marvel-shaped plantar warts growing and aching with every step with no dermatologist to freeze them off – to find an identity of its own. And that’s probably a good thing, given that the one thing you really don’t want to do is alienate the Disney adults, who are proving to be just too high of a percentage of the audience make-up for would-be children’s cinema.
The problems start pretty early, with Jamie Lee Curtis’ disembodied voice describing to us how New Orleans is the most haunted city in the U.S., and the footage that rolls might provide a shock to anyone who, based on the film’s poster, assumed it’d be a period piece – everyone certainly is dressed like it is, after all – and from there we’re introduced to Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), an astrophysicist with impeccable credentials, at the New Year’s Eve party where he met his wife. Flash-forward a handful of years, and Ben’s now a bourbon-soaked Bourbon Street ghost tour guide, snapping at his customers’ enthusiasm for and belief in the supernatural. It’s after one of these disastrous outings that he meets Father Kent (Owen Wilson), who’s heard of a camera that Ben invented on a lark for his now-absent wife, that might be able to capture images of the supernatural. Ben doesn’t want anything to do with whatever the Father’s proposing, but the priest promises that the woman demanding his services will pay top dollar, so he accepts. After traveling far out into the depths of the Bayou, he comes to a stately manner house where the owner, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), pays him in cash and warns him before he steps in that he might have life-changing experiences inside the house. He thinks the woman’s crazy, though he empathizes with her worry for her young and nerdy son (Chase W. Dillon), and his experiences there prove it: he dutifully fakes taking photos and leaves pretty quickly, thinking he’s had a great payday for little work.
Problem is that Ben doesn’t know about the Hitchhiker Effect, even as he binge-watches shows about the paranormal. A sea-obsessed specter follows him back to New Orleans and spews enough salty brine that the dude races back to the mansion, only to find that Gabbie has been waiting for him. They tried to do exactly what he did, only the ghosts followed them to the motel (and apparently, they couldn’t move the TV like Craig T. Nelson in Poltergeist), and, worse, Father Kent knew all about it after the exorcism he performed didn’t take. Soon enough, Ben gets the proof he needs, thanks to the equipment in his spectral camera, to believe in ghosts, and the group starts to recruit other members to uncover the secrets of why this mansion is so damn haunted. They include a psychic (Tiffany Haddish), whom the group initially regards with suspicion until they discover that she actually has the gift, and a historian (Danny DeVito), who takes some convincing in order to wind up helping with the group’s little quest. There, they begin to find out that they’re being stalked by “The Hatbox Ghost” (Jared Leto), a cartoon character who somehow has taken human form in a way, given that he doesn’t really resemble the rest of the film’s aesthetic or fit into it. He wants one final soul for his ritual – having accumulated a near-thousand ghosts all in one spot, he’s either going to have to start charging rent, or he’s gonna have to sacrifice them all in order to free himself, and the dude clearly wants to take the second option. And he’s got his eyes on Ben because the astrophysicist is sad as hell and can’t take it anymore.
Simien’s cast is genuinely well-equipped for the ensemble comedy hiding within the Disney sheen, which, especially when they’re all finally assembled in the middle of the film’s second act, makes the tantalizing glimpses at the movie that could have been all the more frustrating. Leto is, of course, the odd man out: he’s so concealed in CGI and voice modulation that it could quite literally have been anybody in the mocap suit, and no one would have noticed, but he’s relegated to such a small portion of the film (which does bear an outsized influence on the rest of the proceedings) that the rest of the ensemble has room to breathe. Stanfield, with his awkward and good-natured relatability, is a great leading man for a project like this, with his dismissive and ironic-laconic skepticism giving way to a charming acceptance of the unknown (both with regard to the ghosts and to his own capacity for kind feeling), and he pairs well with Dawson, who is also appealingly cast though she’s really not given that much to do. The other members of the core group each bring a different quality to the mix – Wilson’s affable riff on the Bing Crosby parson archetype, Haddish’s exaggerated goofballery (assisted by her ability to straight-up sell a punchline, as in her description of her “evil” sisters), and, of course, DeVito, who gets the film’s best lines and wardrobe in equal measure. In a film in which the costume department went to the nines to Beadazzle Jamie Lee Curtis, it’s telling that DeVito’s nerdy historian steals the show with his bizarre clear-raincoat-and-hat combo. Plus, you get the chance to see him snap shrimp straight from the Benihana flattop, and that may very well be enough to justify the price of admission for most people.
Yet, once again, the problem boils down to this being a modern-day Disney movie, where a germ of an inspired concept — an old-school haunted house ensemble comedy spotlighting undervalued comedic talents of our moment – runs aground upon the dueling forces of smarmy sentimentality and a need to adhere to the conventions of modern spectacle as it is presented to us at the multiplex, justified in theory by the box-offices grosses of their success. Those successes are now four years in the past, back when it seemed that every single film with the Disney production logo attached to them was guaranteed to gross over a billion dollars, and one might think the approach might change. There’s so much potential here, even if it’s weighed down, much like it was with the Murphy version, by the very nature of its theme-park ride adaptation (I long for the days when the theme park-to-film pipeline was reversed, almost as if it should be the natural state of things). But the film grinds to a halt every time it deviates from the fun-and-games of the children’s horror movie and plunges into a five-minute monologue about dead spouses or regret or the ethics of the con men, and all of that hard work is ultimately undone by a finale that can’t help but deviate to the standards of your average Marvel final battle, full of energy pulses, electric blues and the corresponding lack of substance. These stylistic demands are just too much for Haunted Mansion and its ilk, which just never conform to their overlords’ wishes for them to work as an appealing offering in the marketplace and remain too estranged from their director’s vision by those very same dictates to create compelling entertainment.