There I said it, in the first sentence. It's not the only issue I have with it, but one of the most obvious ones. Whatever happened to well-structured 90 minutes movies? This one especially tries so hard to ride the wave of late 80s/90s family movies that the running time should've been a given. But nope, let's add a gazillion subplots that don't really matter.
The film is not without it's upsides though. David Harbour gives a great performance as ghost Ernest and his relationship with Kevin is believable and leads to a few touching moments during the film. Joy is a fun character. The score it great. It's also nice to see Niles Fitch again, though he's criminally underused as the jerkass older brother. Of course there's also Jennifer Coolidge as a fake medium and she slays as always.
I think the film just wants to be too many times all at once. A horror comedy, a family drama, but also a family comedy, an adventure, a little bit of a thriller, a mystery... you name it. While it is possible to cram in many genres at the same time, here it unfortunately doesn't work at all, which leads to tone shifts left and right as well as unresolved plot threads that make junks of the story look completely superfluous.
Anthony Mackie's Frank is a douchebag and I don't feel like the father and son conflict is really solved in the end. The mother is just in this movie, but doesn't really contribute. Tig Notaro's character is build up from the very beginning and then suddenly vanishes from the third act without a resolve. The "evil government" plot doesn't go anywhere. The last minute plot twist (which was pretty easy to guess tbh) has some weird implications (infertile woman goes crazy, makes husband commit murder, steals a child... eh what?) and overall the writing just doesn't have a coherent flow.
It's a movie that could've been so much more than it's, had it just committed to telling like ...one coherent story.
Review by TinkaBlockedParent2023-03-15T18:46:20Z
This movie is too long.
There I said it, in the first sentence. It's not the only issue I have with it, but one of the most obvious ones. Whatever happened to well-structured 90 minutes movies? This one especially tries so hard to ride the wave of late 80s/90s family movies that the running time should've been a given. But nope, let's add a gazillion subplots that don't really matter.
The film is not without it's upsides though. David Harbour gives a great performance as ghost Ernest and his relationship with Kevin is believable and leads to a few touching moments during the film. Joy is a fun character. The score it great. It's also nice to see Niles Fitch again, though he's criminally underused as the jerkass older brother. Of course there's also Jennifer Coolidge as a fake medium and she slays as always.
I think the film just wants to be too many times all at once. A horror comedy, a family drama, but also a family comedy, an adventure, a little bit of a thriller, a mystery... you name it. While it is possible to cram in many genres at the same time, here it unfortunately doesn't work at all, which leads to tone shifts left and right as well as unresolved plot threads that make junks of the story look completely superfluous.
Anthony Mackie's Frank is a douchebag and I don't feel like the father and son conflict is really solved in the end. The mother is just in this movie, but doesn't really contribute. Tig Notaro's character is build up from the very beginning and then suddenly vanishes from the third act without a resolve. The "evil government" plot doesn't go anywhere. The last minute plot twist (which was pretty easy to guess tbh) has some weird implications (infertile woman goes crazy, makes husband commit murder, steals a child... eh what?) and overall the writing just doesn't have a coherent flow.
It's a movie that could've been so much more than it's, had it just committed to telling like ...one coherent story.