The smart scientist Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) gets stuck after a stroke of fate and hires himself out as a tour guide in New Orleans. One day, the priest Kent (Owen Wilson) shows up at his apartment and asks him to use his special camera, which he invented years ago, to examine an old mansion in the swamps near New Orleans – for a hefty reward. Ben reluctantly drives there, meets the new owners with Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and their son Travis (Chase W. Dillon), and pretends to take pictures of ghosts Gabbie insists exist. But when he later returns home, he has to learn firsthand that Gabbie and Travis weren’t exaggerating: they live in a haunted mansion. And their undead residents have a fatal tendency to follow visitors into their homes. The shocked Ben is quickly back in the old building and starts to help Gabbie and Travis in earnest…
The biggest plus of the film is exciting for the smallest target group: Anyone who has ever been to Disneyland Haunted Mansion has visited will be amazed at the cinema how true to the original Simien brought the villa to the screen, how similar the visuals of the attraction and the film have become. But that’s definitely not enough people on the planet to make it a box office hit. That’s why Simien is counting on other attractions in the form of popular actors LaKeith Stanfield, Owen Wilson and Rosario Dawson as well as veteran stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Danny DeVito. And that also pays off. Acting is on haunted mansion little to complain about, even if fans would have liked to have seen the film’s villain longer than is the case here.
But after that it gets thin on the merits that could still be used to praise the film. The screenplay by Katie Dippold, already with the all-female Ghostbusters-Reboot had little success, is in any case a long way from original ideas and at best routinely plays the harmless horror that Disney still dares to play, after all children should also watch the film. That may also be the reason why the special effects are always very mediocre when it comes to the eponymous ghosts. Because the pale figures are certainly not frightening. Quite in contrast to a few peculiarities of the house itself, which are very convincing with their CGI effects, but also show long corridors and impossible stairs instead of creepy ghosts. And for a running time of two hours, both the meager script and the effects are not enough – haunted mansion After the witty start, especially in the second act, he takes his breaks until he picks up speed again for the finale.
The main problem, however, remains the key. A little scary, but in such a way that even young viewers laugh more than are frightened, that’s a fine line that the screenplay and director don’t always walk safely. Sometimes the film turns too much into the silly, sometimes the film gets really dark. Although the humor is generally successful, the fine implementation with a few well-suspended shocks just doesn’t want to happen. The fact that DeVito and Curtis in particular get the most out of their small roles and make faces with obvious fun does haunted mansion good, but no longer heaves the rough-running hybrid into safe waters. Disney hasn’t made much of a fuss about the launch and obviously doesn’t have high expectations for the film. An interested audience shouldn’t do that either. For a nice Sunday afternoon with a gang of ten year olds, could haunted mansion but absolutely correct.
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