Over-built
Are Disney execs paid by produced movie minutes? If not how to explain why ‘Haunted Mansion’ slogs when it should romp?
Haunted Mansion
Director: Justin Simien • Writer: Katie Dippold
Starring: LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Chase W Dillon, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish, Jamie Lee Curtis, Danny DeVito, Charity Jordan
USA • 2hrs 2mins
Opens Hong Kong August 3 • IIA
Grade: C+
Evidently Disney hasn’t had enough of strip-mining its theme parks for movie content. Totally not surprising given the billion-dollar success of Pirates of the Caribbean – if by success you refer to just the first one. Before that they tried Mission to Mars (with Brian De Palma in charge!), and later the one-two punch of Tomorrowland and Jungle Cruise, none of which set the box office on fire, but props for perseverance. Because they’re trying again, this time with Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion, based on the park dark ride attraction The Haunted Mansion.
And it is exactly what it sounds like: Single mom Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase W Dillon) move into a historic New Orleans manor house and promptly discover it’s haunted. Gabbie recruits grieving astrophysicist (random!) Ben Matthias (LaKeith Stanfield) to help locate the ghosts with a special lens he designed, along with priest Father Kent (Owen Wilson), medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish) and historian Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito) to help banish them. Along the way, they win over some ghost allies and summon a super-medium, Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis), from the great beyond. The end product is a prime slab of Disney-approved family fare that could have been much, much worse given its source material and corporate-backed “content creation” mandate; no doubt the hope is that the movie drives people to the parks (there’s a loosely related Mystic Mansion at Hong Kong Disneyland). It’s biggest crime (and easiest fix) is running roughly the same length of time (two hours) as it takes to get on a Disney theme park ride.
The future holds… more ride movies
For the uninitiated, there’s been a Haunted Mansion movie before, in 2003 and starring Eddie Murphy. The story that time pivoted on a curse stemming from a forbidden marriage proposal between a white dude and a Black woman – not an unreasonable scandal warranting a curse. Writer Katie Dippold has avoided race in her work to this point – The Heat, Ghostbusters, Snatched – and she doesn’t make it a factor on any level in Haunted Mansion. Similarly, Simien jettisons the gentle barbs he lobbed in Dear White People, and together they make a bizarrely colourless (literally) adventure comedy – though with three-fifths of its main cast Black, the film is representative of New Orleans overall.
No doubt plenty of pearl-clutching types will be thrilled Dippold and Simien sideline any racial subtext (it takes place in a mansion, in Louisiana… there was plenty of room for subtext) in favour of garden-variety spooky shenanigans. Having never been on the ride it’s hard to say for sure, but the film’s expanding hallways, rotating walls, phantom footsteps and moving eyeballs feel like they’ve been lifted from the attraction; there’s probably a million Easter eggs in it for riders. For everyone else the effects are scary but not terrifying, and there are a couple of solid zingers in the dialogue (which I’ve already forgotten, but they were funny in the moment), but Haunted Mansion strains to fill in its 120 minutes. Shave a half-hour off this and you’ve got an entertaining ghost romp. As it stands it’s an average amusement that overstays its welcome.
Surprisingly there’s considerable emotional gravity in Haunted Mansion thanks to a strong undercurrent about loss, grief and our refusal to let go even when we should. It’s remarkably resonant and relatively affecting, and when it works it’s entirely down to a strong cast that gives their characters far more shading and depth than expected. Stanfield, known best for more agitating work in Sorry to Bother You and Judas and the Black Messiah, is the most left-field casting here, but his seriousness turns him into an effective straight man to Wilson’s, well, Wilson, and he makes Ben’s sorrow palpable. Haddish is legit funny, and no surprise she has the superior comic line delivery, but it’s Dillon, who was heartbreaking as the slave catcher’s assistant in The Underground Railroad, who steals the movie as a kid flailing after the loss of a parent. They lift Haunted Mansion well above its station even if they can’t totally save it – though they probably could have in 90 damn minutes. Good luck with Space Mountain clocking in under 135. — DEK
*Haunted Mansion was reviewed during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, it wouldn't exist.