Director: Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon
Distributor: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
Duration: 86 minutes
The Addams Family (Blu-ray) – Movie Review
If you’re familiar with the family of this newly released movie, from their older appearances, you’ll immediately have the theme song playing in your head, whilst resisting the urge to snap your fingers. It has been a long time since The Addams Family franchise had something new, and the live-action movies already date from 1991 and 1993. Many will have fond memories of the spooky family, be it from the aforementioned films, the series that aired in the 60s or the cartoons from the 90s. There was also another series during the 90s, dubbed The New Addams Family, but let’s just keep that one locked down in the cellar.
The movie starts off with the wedding of Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron). The couple seems to be madly in love, and thus they want to celebrate this occasion with their family. Sadly, the Addams family is quite notorious for being weird, and being somewhat the opposite of what society sets as the standard. They end up being chased out of town, to wander around and find a new living space for their newly made family. They eventually end up on an abandoned asylum on the top of a hill. This place provides an ideal location, as it’s masked by a lot of fog from a local swamp.
We then fast-forward thirteen years into the future, to meet the newest additions to the family, Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard). Wednesday seems to be bored out of her mind after being confounded to the premise of the mansion for her entire life, while Pusgley is training for his Mazurka, which is basically a rite of passage for all members of the Addams family.
At the same time, the area surrounding their mansion on the hill is being terraformed into a new suburban area. This is being done by TV-sensation Margaux Needler (Allison Janney). Due to this, the fog around the hill dissipates, forcing the Addams family to come out of their shell and mingle with their new neighbors. Sadly, it seems once again the general populace will not take a liking to them, as their mansion proves to be a thorn in the side of Margaux, whose future depends on selling houses in this massive makeover project.
The flow of the movie is somewhat what you’d expect of it. You first get to meet the kooky family and their habits and quirks, after building up a fairly happy life for themselves. After that, they get presented with a new and exciting chance to finally fit in somewhere, but sadly, this becomes a problem where the village is slowly turning against them, be it because of Margaux, who is spreading lies. Of course, you can immediately expect that this movie will be one with a happy ending, so there are no real surprises on the horizon. We do have to say that the jokes often fall flat, and that it feels like this movie was made, simply to keep publishing rights of the series.
Acting performances, or at least voicing performances, are actually quite great in this film. We have big hitters in the cast, such as Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Bette Midler and so on, who bring the characters to life in their new digitized forms. The cast is quite expansive for this project, as it includes a lot of characters that get a fair amount of screen time, making it somewhat ambitious for a movie such as this. It’s mainly the writing of the movie, as well as the overall story and execution that makes the entire package a bit wonky.
The Blu-ray edition of The Addams Family comes with a fair amount of extras, ranging from typical deleted scenes and insights in what makes the family tick, to more original special features such as a charades game with Thing and how a scene of an animated movie is created. There are also music videos to be found on the disc, which is also a plus. Overall the extras are actually quite fun to view, even though they are fairly short.
Conclusion
The Addams Family is somewhat entertaining, and will probably entice to children the most. We do feel that the humor often misses its mark, and that it feels like a redundant attempt at keeping the series alive. There are a few fun moments to be experienced throughout the film, and the cast that backed this project is certainly great, it just feels that this movie shouldn’t have been made. Children may enjoy it, fans of the older films might not really appreciate this new attempt at reviving this series though.
The Addams Family (Blu-ray) - Movie Review,
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