Addams Family not so much kooky as altogether droopy

The Addams Family

PG cert, 87 min

★★★★★

Dir Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon Starring Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Finn Wolfhard, Nick Kroll, Bette Midler, Allison Janney

‘They’re creepy and they’re kooky” – as Vic Mizzy’s fingersnapping theme song began to The Addams Family television series in the Sixties – “mysterious and spooky”. Well, the new Addams Family – with apologies to Mizzy for the imprecise rhyme – aren’t so much “kooky” as altogether gloopy. And kind of droopy.

This glum animated reboot – once a stop-motion project for Tim Burton that was abandoned in 2013 – has “will this do instead?” written all over it. And no, it won’t. It’s almost impressive how closely a film can hew to its design brief – the characters look far more like Charles Addams’s original cartoon creations than ever before – while failing to locate the necessary spirit.

The directors-for-hire, Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon, are best-known for the faux-risqué “adult” toon Sausage Party. Given the broad family audience and necessary PG certificate on this occasion, they’re evidently on their best behaviour. But who wants a well-behaved Addams family?

The film operates by subtraction, as if the lower the intended age group, the more half-hearted the attempts at humour have to be. It never grasps how much naughtiness, irreverence, and mad chaos you can get away with – nay, revel in – while aiming yourself uncontentiously at kids.

These weren’t mistakes made by Barry Sonnenfeld’s two Nineties live-action features, deadpan crowd-pleasers that nicely gauged the threshold between campy and sardonic, and made every verbal and visual punchline land crisply.

What do you even do with a film that runs out of enthusiasm for its own routines? We begin with the wedding day of Gomez (voiced by Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron), which is interrupted when an appalled, pitchfork-wielding mob chase them off. Already we’re being force-fed the Addamses as sad-case underdogs –

Wrong tone: the animated family lacks the wit and irreverence of past incarnations almost exactly the wrong tone.

Thirteen years later, they’re installed in their craggy, sooty mansion atop a hill in misbegotten New Jersey, and come under threat again. A reality-television host, the mastermind of a pastel-pretty planned community (“Assimilation”) in the valley below, discovers their eyesore existence.

Allison Janney, at least, has a bossily villainous good time as this Margaux character, her hair a vast blonde waveformation that Farrah Fawcett would have murdered puppies for – even if this whole subplot is suspiciously indebted to the picket-fence idyll of Burton’s Edward Scissorhands.

The voice casting is otherwise skew-whiff. Isaac – underused – makes some mournful sense as Gomez, but how is Theron, beyond a certain regal iciness, apt for Morticia? The elf-like Finn Wolfhard gets to be Pugsley? And oh dear, Chloë Grace Moretz is a completely wet Wednesday, sounding self-pitying, and just as miscast as she was in 2013’s Carrie remake. You don’t even need to compare the career-launching job Christina Ricci did for Sonnenfeld to feel something’s amiss here.

It’s the script – credited to four writers – that’s most sorely lacking, especially after the delicious zingers Paul Rudnick served throughout Addams Family Values (1993): a rare comedy sequel funnier than the original.

Granted, Thing – the disembodied hand – hiding a secret foot fetish on the family laptop is a couple of seconds well spent. But the same creature’s organ duets with Lurch go on and on, eating up the running time, clearly on purpose. This Addams Family thinks it’s enough to dust off the theme tune yet again, with bumptious captions for a closing singalong. Job done? Job never even started.