A movie like IF comes around every 10 years or so. It’s a movie that looks so appealing and amazing in the trailer, you can’t wait until it opens. And then you see it and leave the theaters upset. IF had a 53 percent drop in its second weekend. And even for Memorial Day Weekend, that was a big upset.
If you’ve seen Barry Levinson’s Toys or Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are and especially J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, you should know exactly what happens here. What looks like a fun-filled family movie gets bogged down by a unstructured plot that is a bit darker than how it’s advertised. There’s a lot of bright colors and big lights but I imagine anyone above the primary school level would find it boring and tedious.
The opening is one of those home video montages that only means one thing – someone in the video is going to die. Yes, Up (another two letter title) did the same thing but it was used more for the overall plot. Here it’s just a device. John Krasinki, who wrote, directed and appears as the protagonist’s dad, doesn’t bother to give the mother (Catherine Daddario) a name. That’s how irrelevant she is. You might be scratching your head within the first 10 minutes thinking – where’s Ryan Reynolds?
And that’s disappointment No. 2. Reynolds’ Calvin comes off as more of a sidekick to the main character Bea (Cailey Fleming), who lives in a New York City where she can wander all over the place without people calling the police. I understand some kids in big cities can wander around their neighborhoods. However, it’s only a few blockls here and there. Bea goes all over from Manhattan to Cooney Island. Her father is in the hospital due to have some major heart surgery or something. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a set up so she has to stay with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) who seems mostly oblivious that she’s put in care of her granddaughter.
Bea starts to see strange things from the apartment upstairs where she eventually meets Calvin and characters like Blue (voiced by Steve Carrell), a purple creature that is a cross between McDonald’s Grimace and and James P. Sullivan from Monsters, Inc. In fact, most of the movie seems to be a hodgepodge of Pixar elements cobbled together. And even though Blue was also featured in the previews and trailers, he mainly hangs back most of the movie in the background after first being introduced.
It turns out Calvin is tasked with trying to find new kids for Imaginary Friends, or IF, after the kids who created them have forgotten as they got older. (They did this in Inside Out too. RIP Bing Bong!) Reynolds does his best PG-rated schtick as Calvin who used to be a clown but now acts as an HR manager between the kids and the IF. Most of the IFs look like they came from The Island of Misfit Toys and are voiced by many famous actors. Krasinki’s wife, Emily Blunt, voices a unicorn. Reynold’s wife, Blake Lively, voices a cat who dresses in an octopus costume. There’s also Matt Damon, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, Amy Schumer, Awakafinna, Maya Rudolph, and Jon Stewart just to name a few.
There’s a running gag of Calvin tripping over Keith, an invisible friend, who in the credits is played by Brad Pitt. You see Pitt played Vanisher in Deadpool 2 of which he only has a few scenes of screen time. The gag is that he played an invisible person in that movie and an invisible IF in this one. Considering that most of the intended audience probably having seen Deadpool 2, this joke is meaningless to them, as well as to anyone who doesn’t watch the end credits. I guess maybe it was also a reference to Fight Club since Pitt, played Tyler Durden, an imaginary character too.
The IFs stay at a retirement home on Cooney Island founded by Lewis (voiced by Louis Gossett Jr.), an elderly teddy bar. And even though this might have made a good movie in of itself, we get stuck on Bea’s story which is never clear. She worries about her father but she also befriends a young boy in the hospital, Benjamin (Alan Kim), with hopes of recruiting one of the retired IF to him. Yeah, Toy Story has done this. (As a matter of fact, I’m surprised Disney and Pixar has sued already.)
There’s a lot of nice style and special effects. The movie had a budget of $110 million and you can see where most of that money went. There’s a non-sequitur sequence of Calvin going through a lot of worlds as Tina Turner’s “Better Be Good to Me” plays on the soundtrack. And there’s a beautiful scene where Shaw’s character remembers her childhood and dances while her retired IF Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) dances with her. Yet aside from these few moments, there’s no real excitement. The dance scene alone shows Krasinki has talent as a director. However, there’s too many moments where he seems to emulating Wes Anderson.
However, there is no real texture in this movie. There’s also a twist at the end that doesn’t really come off as a twist considering the character’s role up until the ending. I also think it’s a tired theme that as people get older, they lose their imagination. (Wasn’t this also in The Neverending Story and The Polar Express?.) Also, I couldn’t really understand if Krasinki is trying to tell us that the IFs are real once kids created them or if Bea can only see them because she still has the imagination to see them. Fleming also is nice in the role. Now, that’s she’s 17 in real life, even though it’s hard to believe, hopefully, she can make a transition from child actor to adult actor without being corrupted.
It’s funny Krasinski plays a man who has heart problems because his heart is in the right place with this movie. I just wish he turned to some outside help for work on the script.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 