Haunted Mansion (2023)
Inspired by the Disney theme park attraction, Haunted Mansion is a middling movie haunted by bad CGI and indifferent everything else.
Twenty years ago there was a movie called The Haunted Mansion (2003), starring Eddie Murphy, which wasn’t particularly liked by critics, but which at least doubled its 90 million budget at the box office.
The new one, written by Katie Dippold (The Heat) and directed by Justin Simien (Dear White People) is about astrophysicist turned tour guide and grieving widower Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), who is hired by lapsed priest Kent (Owen Wilson) to help out single mom Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son. Together with a historian (Danny De Vito) and a psychic (Tiffany Haddish) they have to exorcise her newly bought mansion from the ghosts that live there before she can turn this spacious fixer-upper into the bed and breakfast she has dreamt of. But of course that is easier said than done, a phrase that also applies to this attempt at a movie.
The first 15 minutes are okay, but the moment director Simien has his dream team in place he doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with them, so the movie gets bogged down in the middle part, before ending with a mostly predictable climax.
One of the movie’s problems is that the mansion in which most of the action takes place is neither appealing nor spooky, most of the time it just looks plain dull. Story, cinematography, art direction, etc aren’t much better, and as I said in my intro the special effects are for the most part just plain bad.
The movie is rescued to some degree by the actors, whose mere presence is a guarantee for at least a little bit of amusement, even though it’s hard to tell whether it’s really them or just their AI-scans filling in for them.
And even though that last line is a joke, it’s worth noting that - while we’re in the middle of the biggest Hollywood strike in 60 years - this is the kind of ‘made for the shareholders’ movie that we can really do without in the not too distant future.
Allegedly made for a budget of around 160 million dollars, Haunted Mansion should at least have been released around Halloween to fit in with the season. And with Barbie, Oppenheimer and other crowdpleasers currently in theaters, this movie has written ‘major flop’ all over it.