While it didn’t really hold a candle to Barry Sonnenfeld’s live-action films, I liked the first animated Addams Family movie. It made proper use of its new 3D environment, the voice acting was fun, and it even managed to find a way to make the family’s Goth outsider aesthetic resonate in the modern day, when their entire way of life has been wholly embraced in popular culture. I won’t begrudge that film for being popular enough in its own right to warrant a sequel. But looking at what we finally got, I can’t help but think the filmmakers have walked back every step they took with the original.
Let’s start with the writing, which was what initially had me interested to check it out. The main script comes courtesy of Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, who also worked on Pokemon Detective Pikachu, with additional work by Susanna Fogel, who helped with the writing for Booksmart. And then there’s co-writer Ben Queen, whose main cinematic work is his role as the central screenwriter for Cars 2, easily one of Pixar’s biggest cock-ups to date. That last name is the one I mainly wanted to highlight here, as it’s his past pedigree that is the closest I can get to an explanation for just how lame the writing is with this one.
It's a very Wednesday-centric story (once again), and aside from rehashing a lot of the outsider-among-outsiders theming of the first film, it’s all packaged with family switch-up ‘drama’ that is so limp, it never for even a moment gives the impression that it’s going somewhere worthwhile, or that it could hold water in the first place. Not only that, but the main dilemma being that Wednesday might not be an Addams by blood relation? A better film could have wrung a much better message out of the irrelevance of such things, and in the Sonnenfeld era, that’s exactly what we got with all the characters that married into the family. Even if that plotline went anywhere, it still would’ve been ultimately pointless.
Beyond that, it’s a road trip movie spurred on by Gomez overreaching to connect with Wednesday after an incident involving participation trophies (anyone else smell burning straw?), taking the family across the United States. It nudges at an interesting idea with them going to the most infamous tourist spots (Sleepy Hollow, Salem, going to Niagra Falls just to reiterate its body count), but even that facsimile of structure is eventually abandoned for just… anything recognisably American. And aside from a very minor subplot with Fester mentoring Pugsley to help him talk to girls (showing a severe regression from how well he stood out last time), that’s about it as far as narrative goes.
Which itself would’ve been fine were it not for two incredibly important things: The writing for the dramatic moments is awful, and so are the jokes. It’s all so paper-thin and surprisingly unreliant on the Addams’ general worldview (it’s more than a little suss that Wednesday’s trademark noose braids are completely absent here), resulting in such a barrage of hacky humour that, yeah, I totally see this being the product of someone behind the egregious irritation of Cars 2. The only time it is laughable is when it tries to be ever-so-slightly serious, like with Cousin Itt’s translated line of “Children are like socks in the laundry: They have to be lost in order to be found.” You know you’ve hit a brick wall when you’re too pretentious even for me.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s enough here to entertain really young kids. There’s a climactic pseudo-kaiju fight with the big bad villain that I thought was pretty cool, and there’s a level of goofiness here that I can see at least some appeal in, if not necessarily for myself. But when it gets to the point where I’m stretching that much to pay a film a compliment, it should be obvious that the film itself isn’t worth the effort. It’s just bad, and I’m hoping now more than ever that no one at Nitrogen Studios had to work in exploitative conditions to bring this waste of time into being.
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