Haunted Mansion: One Of The Better Movies Based On A Theme Park Ride

The results are typically not very good when amusement park rides are adapted to be a movie. While the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies were great, there is also The Jungle Cruise, the latter two Pirates of the Caribbean, the early-2000s Haunted Mansion
and 1997’s Tower of Terror. Fortunately for Disney, their latest attempt at adapting their park attractions to major theatrical events is among some of the better ones, even if that bar is not particularly hard to clear.

Haunted Mansion follows Gabby (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase Dillon) as they move into a new house in New Orleans that is haunted. They enlist the help of an astrophysicist (LaKeith Stanfield), a priest (Owen Wilson), a medium (Tiffany Haddish), and a professor (Danny DeVito) to try and get the ghosts occupying the house back to their realm. Jamie Lee Curtis and Jared Leto also star.

There are a few key pacing issues with the movie that also dovetails with the main narrative issues that do bring the movie down. Fundamentally it is designed to be viewed by families and is a horror/comedy, all three genres operate best at runtimes of around an hour and a half. Haunted Mansion clocks in at two hours and, while it needs the extra half hour to explain a plot as needlessly complex as this is, it would have been better served simplifying the plot and shortening the film. The motivations of the villainous Hatbox Ghost are never really explained, nor are the repercussions of his escaping the titular mansion. A lot of screen time is devoted to explaining mythos, but it is rarely interesting and even more rarely relevant to the plot. By the time the film passes the mythos, the plot has changed tracks so many times it is hard to keep track of who is doing what and why.

Going along with that, certain things are explained too well while others are not explained nearly enough. The relationship between Travis and Gabby and their father is intentionally kept nebulous, however, it’s pretty easy to figure out what it is from the first interaction between Gabby and everyone else. On top of this, the motivations of the nearly one thousand ghosts who also occupy the house are unclear and should be better established, especially since consent to be killed is such an important aspect of the movie.

That said, the comedy aspects do work and the cast does have good chemistry. The marketing does not do the movie justice because a few of the roles that exist in the film would have been better served as surprises rather than the focal point of the marketing, especially how small but memorable three or four of them are. It is a more enjoyable experience than Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which occupies a similar space as a family-friendly horror-comedy. It is worth watching in a theater, however missing this and waiting for Disney+ would not be the worst thing in the world.

Final Rating: 7/10