It’s been a minute since I visited “The Haunted Mansion” at Disneyland, and almost as long since I watched the Eddie Murphy vehicle that was adapted from the classic theme park attraction in 2003, but I still feel confident that neither of those creepy experiences can match the sheer terror summoned by Justin Simien’s take on the material during its opening credits alone. I’d even go so far as to say that the new “Haunted Mansion” only needs seven little words to establish itself as the spookiest movie of the year, let alone the most spine-tingling version of a dark ride that was designed to make 10-year-olds yelp and giggle with their siblings.
Those words, of course, are: “…and Jared Leto as the Hatbox Ghost.”
Talk about a jump scare! Superimposed over a shot of dark and scary night that barely registers by comparison, that blood-curdling bit of billing hangs over the first hour of this Disney+-worthy tentpole like the Sword of Damocles. Even as the rest of the movie goes slack and its early potential is revealed to be nothing more than a trick of the light, audiences can’t help but wait in clenched suspense to see what sort of twisted shenanigans the man behind Morbius, a Joker, and Paolo Gucci himself will pull to make their kids want to sleep with the lights on.
Alas, when Leto’s character finally shows up amid one of the indistinguishably shapeless passages that render this “Haunted Mansion” undead on arrival, the actor lending his unrecognizable growl to a Grinch-looking CGI ghoulie who harkens back to the ride’s original design, he makes almost no impression whatsoever. If not for those opening credits, you wouldn’t have any idea who was playing the evil spirit; that isn’t because the famously method-minded Leto disappears so deep into his role, but rather because it isn’t much of a role at all.
Even more egregiously than Jamie Lee Curtis’ glorified cameo as a psychic who’s trapped in her own crystal ball (kinda funny!), or Dan Levy’s two-line, one facial-expression cameo as the overeager guide of a ghost tour (now I am become death, the destroyer of laughs), the Hatbox Ghost seems less like the work of an actor than it does the result of a Midjourney prompt.
That disappointment proves typical of this sleepy, hollow story about a headless ghost and the gaggle of humans trapped in his murder house, as Simien’s first studio feature neither follows through on its promises nor makes good on its threats. It might chill a decent chunk of its target audience, easing the pre-teen crowd into PG-13 horror in much the same way as the younger-skewing likes of “Goosebumps” or “The Addams Family” (2019) may have prepared kids for this, but it certainly won’t haunt them into revisiting it with kids of their own one day.
As with the previous “Haunted Mansion” movie, this misfire certainly isn’t hurting for talent. Both a gifted satirist — see: “Dear White People,” a 2014 Sundance hit that was later expanded into an even more brilliant and cutting Netflix series of the same name — and also someone who’s previously displayed a clever mind for comic horror (“Bad Hair”), Simien couldn’t seem any better-suited to revamp this creaky IP for contemporary audiences.
The renovations Simien made to the property are mighty intriguing on paper, none more so than his transformative decision to cast LaKeith Stanfield in the lead role. Race is never explicitly mentioned in the film (a bit where Stanfield alludes to the cops as the lesser of two evils is as close as it gets), but Simien deepens Katie Dippold’s featherlight script by reframing it as the story of a guarded Black man who’s forced to navigate his own vulnerability in a world that’s given him good reason to be more afraid of people than ghosts.
While it’s a thoughtful approach, and one that helps to explain why Stanfield plays the recently widowed Ben as a guy who can’t even put on his pants in the morning without a compass, the ever-idiosyncratic “Judas and the Black Messiah” actor struggles (and I mean struggles) to split the difference between the gravity of his character’s grief and the blithe spirit of a movie in which, say, Danny DeVito hunts ghosts in a plastic body suit. The most generous explanation for Stanfield’s mumbly and stifling performance as a day-drunk New Orleans tour guide would be that he was trying to tap into the great Disney alcoholics of yore (specifically Jack Sparrow), but the soberingly real nature of his character’s circumstances makes it hard for him to play that sort of slashed indifference.
A former astrophysicist who invented a camera capable of seeing into the spirit world, Ben trashed his invention after the death of his non-character wife made it too painful for him to use it. Now he spends his days leading groups of white women named Carol around the local landmarks while aggressively debunking the ghost stories they’ve heard about “the most haunted city in the world.”
You might think that inventing a camera capable of seeing ghosts might have convinced Ben otherwise, but “Haunted Mansion” has less than zero interest in the extent of its hero’s denial, let alone his feelings about the emergent possibility of communing with his dead wife again (a strange choice for a movie whose entire third act depends upon dangling that idea in front of him). All we know is that he doesn’t take Father Kent very seriously when the exorcist door stops him in the hopes of borrowing his DSLR of the damned (Father Kent is played by Owen Wilson in a fun performance that could only be given by Owen Wilson, which somewhat takes the edge off the fact that it has been given by Owen Wilson so many times before).
You see, a single mother from New York (Rosario Dawson in the thankless role of Gabbie) and her nine-year-old son Travis (Chase W. Dillon) have just moved to the most haunted mansion (!) in all of Louisiana, and there’s no hope of escaping its curse. The 999 spirits who live there will let you leave at any time, but they’ll follow anyone who crosses the threshold for the rest of their natural lives, which helps to explain why Father Kent has so much skin in the game. The same is soon true for Ben, in addition to a flamboyant local medium named Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), whose confidence betrays her lack of vision, and later a kooky Tulane professor (DeVito) who’s seen a few too many episodes of “Ghost Hunters.”
Together, this motley crew of paranormal semi-experts will try to solve the half-hearted mystery behind the big creepy murder house, which gestures at the white rebellion against wealthy Creoles in the 19th century, only to slink away into some rehashed Tom Riddle tropes that feel like a thousand studio notes stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat.
The material simply isn’t strong or self-interested enough to support a cast as rich as the one Simien assembles here, a fact made all the more obvious by the director’s natural facility for staging ensemble comedy in the face of mortal danger. Stanfield’s recessive performance is a striking outlier in a film that, for all of its shortcomings, does a fine job of straddling the line between fun and scary, as “Haunted Mansion” serves up a well-balanced mess of soft jolts and macabre CGI wraiths. Candelabras float, paintings follow you with their eyes, and generic blue ghosties continue to chase the cast down the corridors Scooby-Doo style long after it’s clear that neither the living nor the dead would know what to do if they actually made contact with each other. Or themselves, for that matter. Considering that Ben and Gabbie have no other meaningful connection, the inevitable attraction between them might have been worth acknowledging before the last few seconds of the movie.
But despite a confident introduction and some first act scenes that — in stark contrast to the last 10 years of studio movies — shoot New Orleans without having to pretend that it’s nowhere, “Haunted Mansion” quickly devolves into a 123 minutes of tone in search of a shape. Most of the action is confined to Gabbie’s sprawling new house, where impressive set design is soon overwhelmed by the kind of spatially incoherent chases that would almost be impossible to stage without the benefit of computers.
When someone in the opening minutes intones that “grief can be a doorway to joy if you’re willing to open it,” those words feel like a fine bit of table-setting at the start of a movie that seems poised to put the fun back into “my wife got into a fatal car accident on the way back home from Burger King.” By the time “Haunted Mansion” circles back to that idea some two hours later, the relationship between grief and joy feels like a frustratingly ambitious subject for a movie that doesn’t seem to understand how regular doorways work.
Even the most iconic sequences associated with the Disneyland attraction are undone by the undisciplined need for big-screen spectacle; believe it or not, the bit where the walls stretch to reveal new horrors isn’t helped by the sudden addition of a gloopy CGI crocodile who disappears a few moments later, never to be mentioned again. Time and again, such classic “how did they do that?” magic is replaced by choices that seem determined to obscure what it is that’s being done in the first place (I promised myself I wouldn’t rant about the digital zooms). Where the “Haunted Mansion” ride engineers a creepy dislocation, this version settles for “it doesn’t matter where I am” confusion.
Too scattershot and herky-jerky to ever approximate the feeling of a ride, the ghost sequences stop and start without any sense of place, rhythm, or purpose. The spirits are as interchangeable as the hallways, to the point that the film’s one clearly defined ghost — an old mariner with a hankering for “Deadliest Catch” — is left holding the bag for an entire army of the dead. Truth be told, it’s almost impressive that a movie boasting 999 ghosts “and Jared Leto” as their evil leader could end up feeling this soulless.
Grade: C-
Walt Disney Pictures will release “Haunted Mansion” in theaters on Friday, July 28.
