The Addams Family

It’s as if someone took a beloved animal to a taxidermist and ended up with a less-than-desirable end product, The character and family-like aura of the Addams Family becomes absent in this rendition that in my opinion is simply a wannabe family entertaining film with next to no character animation. There are references to the earlier works, such as the cartoons created by Charles Addams which were published in the New Yorker, as well as the 1990s movies and the American sitcom from the 1960s. However, this film is nowhere near as eerie or kooky as it should have been.

It’s also a waste of a killer voice cast. For example, Charlize Theron is matriarch Morticia Addams (animated with none of the delicious vampire sexiness Anjelica Huston brought to the role). Oscar Issac is her husband Gomez, and the couple’s children, Wednesday and Pugsley, are voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz and Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard. When we first see how they live, it is above a town in New Jersey, in the remains of a lunatic asylum, and at the end of the street, interior decorator and TV star Margaux (Allison Janney) resembles a cross between Dolly Parton and a bulldozer that is busy constructing fifty new homes. When they refuse to paint their eyesore of a gothic mound, Margaux presses her hatred into anger, gets the townsfolk up in arms, and begins issuing flyers urging them to take stock of all their ghettos in the area and around the US.

While their parents go to war, Wensday befriends Miss Margaret’s awkward daughter. In defiance to her mother, Wensday, surprisingly for Churick’s more eerie than venomous voice, pours out warm words with a sardonic tinge revealing what a horrible boy M is caressing her mother. (In one of the film’s best scenes, she comes back from the shopping mall with a rainbow-wicked unicorn hair clip sweeping Morticia standing aghast: “How dare you bring that into my house!”).

Their narration leads one to a place where ‘manufacturing a change or complying with an external force’ appears to have been the message of the whole movie. It would have been painfully ludicrous to presume as such. To push good in the good family movies such as these, a mess of conflict would have sufficed. The family dramas open a heartwarming break that was sorely missed in dramas.

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