ALTOGETHER OK
‘Addams Family’ delivers light laughs, heavy-handed message
Not every family looks and acts the same. We shouldn’t judge others for being different. Not every family looks and acts the same. We shouldn’t judge others for being different. Not every fam —
Sorry. I know that was getting repetitive, but it should give you an inkling of how I felt while sitting through the computer-animated version of “The Addams Family,” which, like the 1960s TV sitcom and the 1970s cartoon series and various film adaptations and the Broadway musical, is based on the famous magazine cartoons created by Charles Addams.
It’s understandable why we’ve seen so many takes on this delightfully weird and darkly eccentric extended family. After all, they’re creepy and they’re kooky, they’re altogether ooky.
This time around, however, they’re mired in a breezy and intermittently funny but not particularly original story that presents some mildly amusing gross-out sight gags in between often wince-inducing, pun-based humor, and the aforementioned heavy-handed message-sending about tolerance and acceptance and learning how to live and let live.
Even the addition of some hip-hop tunes to liven things up and the voice presence of Snoop Dogg as Cousin Itt seem kinda 1995ish and uninspired.
With the animation rendering sharp but rather flat visuals that rarely pop from the screen, we join Gomez Addams (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) on the night of their nuptials, which end just after the vows as the townsfolk storm the ceremony and drive “the monsters” out of town.
Gomez says they need to find a home in a place so horrible, no one in their right mind would want to live there. Cut to a sign saying, “WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY. What’s it to ya?”
Ba dum-bum.
Flash forward 13 years. Living in a former mental institution featuring all kinds of cool haunted features, the Addams family’s numbers have grown to include the brooding Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz), the bumbling, explosives-obsessed Pugsley (Finn
Wolfhard) and the hulking, piano-playing Lurch (Conrad Vernon, who also co-directed). They’re soon joined by Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll), Grandmama (Bette Midler) and a host of other Addams relatives, all coming to town to celebrate a Bar Mitzvah-like celebration for Pugsley. (He reads from “The Terror” as opposed to The Torah.)
Meanwhile, just down the hill, the awfully terrible and terribly awful reality-TV host Margaux Needler (Allison Janney) has created the town of Assimilation, where all the houses look alike and all the residents sing about how conformity is the way to go, and you’ll be much happier if you just go along with the crowd and don’t think for yourself.
Directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan and screenwriter Matt Lieberman serve up a steady diet of corny gags, as when Morticia shows off the wine cellar and it turns out to be a “whine cellar,” where you can hear voices saying things such as, “Are we there yet?” or when Morticia creates a temporary bridge out of a jillion spiders and says, “We call this surfing the web.”
They also have a real thing for blowing things up, with Pugsley’s affinity for explosives providing the convenient means to fill the screen with pyrotechnics at the expense of spending more time with all those cheerfully bizarre extended family members voiced by the immensely talented but in some cases barely used comedic ensemble.
As quickly as Thing can snap its fingers, we’ll soon forget our visit with this version of “The Addams Family.”