The New Haunted Mansion Reboot is the Very Definition of "Meh"

I'm not sure this movie needed to be made.

As a longtime pop culture writer I am continually amazed by the deeply meaningless yet weirdly fascinating coincidences of my life’s work. 

Yesterday, for example I wrote about Kevin Smith’s 2022 squeakquel Clerks III, a ghost-themed Rosario Dawson movie that was sold as a lightweight, escapist comedy but that’s actually about a main character so overwhelmed with grief over the death of his wife in a car accident that he’d seemingly prefer death to a life without his soulmate. 

Today, in sharp contrast I watched Haunted Mansion, a ghost-themed Rosario Dawson movie that was sold as a lightweight, escapist comedy but that’s actually about a main character so overwhelmed with grief over the death of his beloved wife in a car accident that he’d seemingly prefer death to a life without his soulmate. 

In Clerks III the perpetually mourning widower is indie film icon Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) and the dead wife who dominates his thoughts is played by Rosario Dawson in ghost form. 

In Haunted Mansion LaKeith Stanfield, a brilliant actor with some deeply questionable beliefs plays Ben Matthias, a deeply depressed scientist turned surly New Orleans tour guide who cannot forget his dead wife Alyssa (Charity Jordan), no matter how desperately he tries.

Ah, but Ben isn’t the only character mourning a loved one. Travis (Chase W. Dillon), the neurotic son of Rosario Dawson’s Gabbie is similarly in a state of eternal mourning over his recently deceased dad. 

I suppose it shouldn’t come as a total surprise that a movie called Haunted Mansion is full of death and despair. But it’s a testament to what a misguided, weirdly maudlin endeavor Haunted Mansion is that Clerks III, a Kevin Smith second sequel, handles its heavy dramatic elements far more capably and confidently than a movie starring LaKeith Stanfield. 

LaKeith Stanfield is a great, Academy Award-nominated actor as well as a seriously strange dude. To say that he is more of an actor and a better actor than Brian O’Halloran is wild understatement. 

The crucial difference is that Clerks III is a labor of self-love from a filmmaker madly in love with his characters and his movies. Haunted Mansion, however, could not be more of a mercenary cash grab. 

I know exactly why Stanfield took on the lead role. It involves a check with a whole lot of zeros on it. For him, this was clearly just another paycheck gig. For Brian O’Halloran, Clerks III was an opportunity that he could be a convincing dramatic actor and deliver a big monologue and not just be a random dude lucky enough to know Kevin Smith at the very beginning of a career that went farther than even his biggest fan could imagine. 

Stanfield isn’t the only thespian of note in the film’s disgustingly overqualified cast. Haunted Mansion is full of actors I love in roles I will not remember three days from now. 

The cast is filthy with ringers. Danny DeVito! The aforementioned Rosario Dawson! The increasingly tiresome Tiffany Haddish! National treasure Danny DeVito! Motherfucking Owen Wilson, the man who co-wrote Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenanbaums! Academy Award winner Jamie Lee Curtis! Winona Ryder! Dan Levy! 

Dan Levy, incidentally, provides the film’s sole moment of amusement as a hilariously tacky ghost tour guide who is way into his work. He consequently is onscreen for maybe two minutes. 

Jared Leto, regrettably, is also in the cast as the Hatbox Ghost, an uninspired CGI creation like all of the film’s other supernatural specters. Unless you’re Peter Jackson, it can be hard, if not impossible, to invest CGI with personality but Haunted Mansion isn’t any bigger on personality anymore than it is originality. 

Haunted Mansion chronicles the supernatural shenanigans that ensue when an aggregation of ghost-obsessed eccentrics descend upon the titular spooky abode looking for proof of life on the other side. 

These folks include psychic Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), Father Kent (Owen Wilson), a fake priest for whom pretending to be a man of God is just another grift and preternaturally minded academic Professor Bruce Davis (DeVito).  

These strangers turned allies try to figure out the mystery behind the mansion and how they can stop its supernatural evil and shut down its primary villain the Hatbox Ghost. 

There was a time when I would be very excited to see Owen Wilson in a movie, even a goofy horror film like Anaconda or The Haunting. I loved Owen Wilson because of  his collaborations with Wes Anderson but also because Wilson improvised and ad-libbed so extensively that it often felt like he was in a different, looser, funnier and more entertaining movie than everybody else. 

In his prime Wilson brought an oddball, spontaneous energy to everything that he did. Then, at some point Wilson seems to have stopped trying. Wilson seemingly chooses his roles at random at this point. He’s in a lot of movies and the ones that aren’t directed by Anderson tend to be on the forgettable and interchangeable side. 

On a similar note, it used to be exciting and special for Bill Murray to show up in even a tiny cameo. It meant something. It was a coup. It connected the movie to a glorious cinematic legacy of laughter and pathos. 

That hasn’t been the case for a very long time now. A Bill Murray cameo doesn’t count for much these days and may actually be a negative considering his new/old reputation as a creep. 

Wilson is way too comfortable being the fourth male lead in a schlocky piece of entertainment based on a theme park attraction. If he’s found his level, then he’s aiming way too low. 

At no point did Wilson’s performance here make me say “Wow” in astonishment.

DeVito is similarly one of my favorite performers of all time. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is one of my five favorite television shows of all time. Yet I will remember nothing of DeVito or his performance here except that he was part of a surprisingly stacked cast unsurprisingly given little to do but play second fiddle to some dodgy CGI. 

DeVito’s forgettable turn here is even more glaring considering that his wife of several hundred years, Rhea Perlman, is also in a movie currently in theaters based on a popular IP where she has roughly the same amount of screen time as her hubby, if not less. 

The big difference is that Perlman’s cameo in Barbie as her real-life inventor was one of the best scenes in a movie people will be talking about and celebrating fifty years from now whereas Haunted Mansion will disappear inside the same memory hole as the Eddie Murphy-fronted “original” and no one will think about it until it’s rebooted in 2038. 

Barbie illustrates that movies like this do not need to be bad. It shows that movies based on shit from everyone’s American childhood don’t have to be lazy or arbitrary or mercenary. It’s making slop like Haunted Mansion seem even more lacking by comparison. 

Speaking of superior versions, Academy Award-winning super-genius Guillermo Del Toro wrote a screenplay for Haunted Mansion, an attraction he loves, that was turned down by Disney for being “too scary.” 

Needless to say, that’s not a problem with the finished film, whose screenplay is credited to Katie Dippold of the lady Ghostbusters reboot infamy but feels like the hackwork of at least a half dozen script doctors whose attitude towards their work can best be summarized as “At least I got paid.” 

I watched Haunted Mansion with my eight year old son Declan. He’s obsessed with Disney and Disney Land. We’ve been watching a ten-part behind the scenes Disney+ docu-series on Disney Land attractions that includes an episode on Haunted Mansion. 

The episode highlighted a conflict in the ride’s conception between imagineers who wanted the Haunted Mansion to be funny and imagineers who wanted the Haunted Mansion to be scary. 

Haunted Mansion resolves this battle in a uniquely unsatisfying way by being neither funny nor frightening. 

Two stars out of Five