Disney’s new film adapted from ride fails to move the spirit

Perhaps in 2043, Disney will make a top-notch movie based on its Haunted Mansion theme park ride.

Powered by a typically engaging performance by its star, Eddie Murphy, 2003’s The Haunted Mansion performed pretty well at the box office, but it is a rather meandering affair.

The second Haunted Mansion – in theaters this week, a few months shy of 20 years later – weaves a mostly different tale but is a similarly slightly scary-meets-family-friendly romp boasting a highly appealing ensemble led by Rosario Dawson, LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, and Owen Wilson.

It’s also similarly ho-hum.

That’s disappointing given not only its cast – which also features Danny DeVito, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jared Leto – but also its flavorful New Orleans setting and its director, Justin Simien, who wrote and directed 2014’s Dear White People, as well as episodes of the TV series of the same name.

How the film plays out

Things start out well enough, with our introduction to Ben (Stanfield), an astrophysicist, who, in a bar on New Year’s Eve, meets Alyssa (Charity Jordan), who leads ghost tours. They bond over how each, in his or her own way, strives to see the unseen.

Simien then cuts to Ben perched on a barstool, waking up from a booze-fueled nap year later. He proceeds to lead his late wife’s former endeavor, calling it a “historical walking tour” and grumpily telling those taking part there will be “no ghost stories.”

We then meet widowed doctor Gabbie (Dawson), relocating to The Big Easy – “a paranormal place ... where death is not an ending but a new beginning,” as a narrator informs us – with 9-year-old son Travis (Chase W. Dillon) to open a bed and breakfast in a history-rich mansion. It quickly becomes apparent to them they are not alone in the vacant house, causing her to abandon her plans and leave with Travis.

Only temporarily, however.

Ben is recruited by a concerned priest, Father Kent (Wilson), to visit with Gabbie in the house and to use a camera he’d developed that theoretically should be able to capture images of any spirits lingering about the place.

Taking the gig for its sizeable payday, Ben is greeted by Maddie at the front door, the woman calmly warning him about the dangers that come with entering the house, concerns the nonbeliever dismisses. He takes his duties here less than seriously and assures Gabbie she and her son simply are victims of the power of suggestion.

As he drives away, a laughing spirit says to himself that Ben will be back.

After seeing what happens to Ben away from the mansion, we understand why Gabbie and Travis returned.

Now all living in the house, Gabbie, Travis, Ben, and Father Kent bring a medium, Harriet (Haddish), into the increasingly frightful fold, much to her displeasure.

They next elicit help from Bruce (DeVito), a Tulane professor who’s an expert on the city’s haunted history. They try to keep him away from the house due to his heart condition, but his eagerness to be involved proves to be too strong.

With the pieces in place, Haunted Mansion gets progressively zanier but not more enjoyable. It becomes harder and harder to remain invested in the story, with the Hatbox Ghost (voiced by Leto) emerging as the big bad foe to human and spirit alike.

One reason for concern with the new Haunted Mansion is its writer, Kate Dippold. She brought little to the table with the Paul Feig-directed comedies The Heat (2013) and Ghostbusters (2016), leaving the movies’ respective talented leads to have to burn too many calories in futile attempts to make things work.

However, her Haunted Mansion screenplay is at least passable. (Perhaps Dippold found the inspiration she needed by, as the movie’s production notes state, locking herself away in a room of a New Orleans hotel reputed to be haunted to work on the script.)

At a minimum, a few decent jokes fall flat in the hands of Simien, whose credits also include the 2020 horror-comedy Bad Hair. While a certain enthusiasm pervades Haunted Mansion, the director simply feels like the wrong person for the job; never finding a way to make all the moving parts feel cohesive.

He gets fine-enough work from his leads, but, with the possible exception of Haddish, none of them has the ability of an Eddie Murphy to keep a dying movie alive by sheer force of will. And if the Girls Trip star does have it, she doesn’t show it here.

It is nice to see Stanfield – a supporting player in acclaimed movies Get Out and Judas and the Black Messiah and the recently wrapped TV series Atlanta – get the opportunity to be front and center in a major release. However, his strongest scene, in which Ben delivers an emotionally powerful speech about the love he still holds for Alyssa, feels like it belongs in a series drama. (It is almost shockingly affecting.)

Judas and the Black Messiah scene partners Stanfield and Plemons talk about their complex villains, filming in Cleveland.

You can’t blame the pervasive meh-ness of Haunted Mansion on it being based on a theme park ride, considering the entertainment value of 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, if not all its sequels, and 2021’s slightly underrated Jungle Cruise.

We’ll see how it goes if the House of Mouse takes another stab at it in a couple of decades.

(The News-Herald (Willoughby, Ohio)/TNS)