There must have been something in the water the week of Sept. 18, 1964. That’s when the ghouls-are-us sitcom “The Addams Family” premiered on ABC — and exactly six days later, the ghoul…
These two play off the flourishes of macabre comedy that are sprinkled through the film like marshmallow bits: Morticia, in the opening sequence, spooning out ashes from the urns of her late mother and father and dabbing them on as blush and mascara, or Lurch using a vacuum cleaner to spread dust throughout the Addams Family mansion and taking a good ten seconds to croak out the words “” or 12-year-old Pugsley blowing himself up with a cherry bomb so that Gomez can say, “They blow up so fast...
Jokes like these provoke a mild grin of amusement. Yet if the movie really wanted to run with how the members of the Addams Family are united in their antisocial dark glee, it should have turned them into flip superstars of demonic flamboyance; it should have made them into the Indreadables. And it should have invested their story with something to actually care about.
Instead, “The Addams Family” has a rote plot built out of bits and pieces from a lot of other animated films that had nothing to do with lumbering eight-foot-tall butlers or posh mistresses of the house who look like spindly vampiric cadavers. The movie serves up the standardized tale of an alienated tween — Wednesday, so pale and sad that she looks like a punk bowling pin, and voiced with winning disaffection by Chloë Grace Moretz.
The movie combines all that with a battle against one of those conformist towns, like the city of awesomeness in “The Lego Movie” or the starliner Axiom in “WALL·E” or the Institute of Perfection in “UglyDolls,” that have become so satirically commonplace that they’re barely satirizing conformity anymore. They’re just mimicking it.
“The Addams Family” is a luscious piece of macabre design. The characters have been computer-drawn so that they’re exceedingly close to the ones in Charles Addams’ original cartoons, and the film is full of keen visual details like Lurch’s ancient cracked fingernails, or Wednesday’s pigtails braided like hanging nooses, or the army of spiders that comes scuttling out of Morticia’s dress to form a bridge over the bottomless pit in the basement.
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