Disney has a history of turning their theme park rides into movies. Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise are a couple of examples of this. Haunted Mansion was already made into a film with lackluster results. So they decided to give this one another chance and so that’s why the new film is coming out this week in theaters.

A mom Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase Dillon) decide they need a change of pace and so they move to New Orleans. They move into a large old Mansion that once they get there they find out that’s haunted. Hence the title of the film. She enlists the help of a priest Kent (Owen Wilson) to recruit some people who can help her rid the house of all its spooky inhabitants. Among those are Ben Mathias (Lakeith Stanfield) who is an ex physicist, a Professor (Danny Devito) who has written about the said haunted Mansion in the past and a medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish) who may not be exactly as she seems.

When they get there they realize they can’t leave without ghosts following them around into the outside world. So they reluctantly help the woman and her son try to rid the house of ghosts. The problem is there is one specific ghost who is controlling the situation and he has been for hundreds of years. Allister Crump (Jared Leto) has a plan to come back to life and these intrepid men and women have to stop him. Including a woman named Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis) who is stuck in a crystal ball. As you can imagine chaos ensues. 

This film is meant to be a funny ghost story with a lot of visual effects. The problem is I didn’t laugh once at this movie. With this cast, you’d think they would bring the yuck yucks but they didn’t. I was pretty sad about that. These are some pretty funny actors and they should have had a lot of funny moments but they didn’t. The other thing that was a big letdown was that this film wasn’t scary either. For a film called Haunted Mansion, you’d think it would be scary at one point or another but it wasn’t scary at all. These facts disappointed me greatly. 

The visual effects were the only redeeming quails of this movie. The filmmakers put a lot of thought and imagination into how the ghosts were going to look, and there’s a lot of ghosts, and how they were going to move. Especially the main ghost played by Leto. He looked really cool. And the way he moved was very interesting. If the filmmakers worked on the script as much as they worked on the visual effects this movie would have been much better. It’s sad because I was looking forward to a funny and scary haunted house film.

The story was a bit weird and I think it took too long to get to the main crux of what the motivations of the main ghost were. There was quite the information dump for viewers to get the gist of what the main story was truly about. By that point, we were sick of all the ancillary stuff that was going on in the film. The writer Katie Dippold could have made the story less complicated and allowed the actors more room to adlib so the movie would have been much funnier.  The main plot was too convoluted and it took away from my enjoyment of the movie.

Haunted Mansion had a fantastic cast that wasn’t allowed much room to adlib or breathe for that matter with regard to the main story. The lackluster comedy and scares were a detriment to my enjoyment of the film. The visual effects were the only redeeming quality of the movie. That’s sad because if the filmmakers concentrated on the story from a scary or funny aspect it may have been better. This amazing cast was essentially wasted in this CGI ghost story that wasn’t much better than the original Haunted Mansion. Disney is having a rough summer.

2 stars

Dan Skip Allen