The Addams Family

THE Addams Family has been a part of American culture since its one-panel cartoons appeared in The New Yorker in 1938. The family’s history includes a TV series in the 1960s (that, of course, gave us that snap-happy theme song), two live-action films in the 1990s, countless animated adaptations and a Broadway musical.

The new animated film has to live up to a rich legacy, and although it will probably make a decent amount of money, it is a major creative letdown.

There are scraps of plot about father Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and macabre mother Morticia (Charlize Theron) fleeing a world that rejects them, the kids growing up in isolation, moody-even-for-a-teenager daughter Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz) wanting to go to public school just to annoy her parents, brilliant son Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) training for a reunion-worthy swordplay ritual that he hates, and a neighbour (Allison Janney) who wants to destroy the family’s converted-asylum home because it’s an eyesore and has no business overlooking her town with the waytoo-on-the-nose name of Assimilation. None of it really matters, the movie knows you’re just here to see the Addams Family be the Addams Family. Yeah, if nothing else, everybody pretty much stays in character.

But the movie adds little to the family dynamic. Maybe a few jokes about smartphones and home renovation shows, but that’s it. Speaking of jokes, a lot of the humour in this movie falls flat. I was able to guess the vast majority of punchlines before they were uttered, and the physical humour is equally uninspired.

I hate to disparage a property I love as much as

The Addams Family, but it’s being poorly handled here. – Kevin Green/greensburg Daily News/tribune News Service