tek's rating:

The Addams Family (PG)
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This came out in 2019, and I saw it on DVD in 2021, on the opening night of the sequel.

Ah, the Addams Family. I never read the original comics, but I do appreciate that the animation in this movie closely resembles that art style. And I liked the voice performances. But alas, the story itself did little for me. It begins with the wedding of Morticia (Charlize Theron) and Gomez (Oscar Isaac). They and their whole extended family get chased away by angry villagers who think they're monsters, so Gomez and Morticia move to New Jersey, where they take over an abandoned (and haunted) insane asylum. The movie then flashes forward 13 years, and they now have two children: Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard, from Stranger Things). Gomez wants Pugsley to prepare for his upcoming Sabre Mazurka, a performance all their relatives will come to watch (and judge). But Pugsley is no good with a sabre; he prefers explosives. Meanwhile, a whole town called Assimilation has been built nearby, under the supervision of a home makeover TV host named Margaux Needler (Allison Janney). The Addamses' house had been hidden by fog, but that clears up when the nearby marshland is drained, and Margaux is aghast at the sight of it. So of course she wants to make it over. But of course the Addamses don't want that. Also Wednesday decides she wants to attend the local school, and makes a new friend named Parker (Elsie Fisher, from Eighth Grade), who is Margaux's daughter. The two of them end up rebelling a bit against their mothers. And... when all the Addams relatives come to town, Margaux wants to run the whole family out of town, so she stirs up the ire of the townsfolk. Because she has to sell 50 houses in the town, otherwise she'll lose her job. And she thinks the Addamses will deter anyone from wanting to buy homes near them.

That's all I want to say about the plot, and there's not much more to it, anyway. There are some decent gags, mostly the usual macabre sort of Addams Family humor, but on the whole the movie never really seemed like anything special. It was just sort of okay, which really disappointed me, because I really wanted to like it more than I did, being a fan of the 1990s live-action movies. Oh well. There's a sequel to this movie, but I doubt I'll ever bother watching it.


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