Kooks don’t spook
THE ADDAMS FAMILY 2
Cert PG
In cinemas now
★★
Being different is the most Addamsy thing,” says Wednesday (voiced by Chloe Grace Moretz) in the second big-screen adventure for the fourth incarnation of America’s most macabre family.
She’s got a point. Few teenagers have roaring lions and disembodied hands as pets or heads shaped like bowling pins.
These quirky details should be enough to divert younger children but grown-ups reared on the 60s sitcom, the 90s movies or Charles Addams’ iconic comic books may find this lazy sequel crushingly familiar.
Shamelessly ripping off the far superior Hotel Transylvania 2, this time Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and his loving wife Morticia (Charlize Theron) take their kids on a road trip in a purple smoke-belching, Gothic-styled camper van.
Along the way, Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll) is slowly turning into a sea monster, Pugsley ( Javon Walton) is looking for a girlfriend and Wednesday suspects she may have been switched at birth.
This sloppily plotted sequel is still an improvement on the first animation from 2019, which felt even less “Addamsy” with its messages about diversity and the dangers of online bullying. At least this one attempts to bring back the darker, kookier tone of early versions with a nod to the horror classic Carrie and a scene in a mad scientist’s laboratory.
Sadly, the gags are dead on arrival. In one sequence, the Addams family visit a modern building in Texas which a neon sign identifies as “The Alamo”. Once inside, two more letters flicker into life, revealing it to be a nonsensical establishment called the “The Ala Motel”. That it took four credited writers to come up with this is genuinely shocking.
Charles Addams must be rotating in his crypt.
This attempts to bring back a darker, kookier tone but the gags are dead on arrival