"Haunted Mansion" boasts great talent but too much of a mixed mulligan

Haunted Mansion (2023)

“Haunted Mansion” is a mulligan in adapting the Disney theme park ride after 2003’s family-friendly but middle-of-the-road “The Haunted Mansion” with Eddie Murphy. Oozing with talent behind—“Dear White People” and “Bad Hair” director Justin Simien and writer Katie Dippold (the unfairly trashed 2016 “Ghostbusters” reboot)—and in front, this gateway horror-comedy is, once again, too much of a mixed bag. It’s fitfully amusing, and spooky on a few occasions, but more often bland and joyless. One just keeps wanting to like it more.

“Haunted Mansion” begins with promise, ensuring a lot of local color from a New Orleans milieu. We first meet astrophysicist Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), who becomes a complete skeptic after the death of his wife. He’s now a tour guide, like his wife, and has somewhat developed a specialized camera lens that captures spectral images. It might come in handy when he’s enlisted by priest Father Kent (Owen Wilson), who was brought in to perform an exorcism. Single mother Gabbie (a lovely Rosario Dawson) and her lonely 9-year-old son Travis (Chase W. Dillon) recently moved into a local mansion, but on their first night with too many creepy encounters, they actually did something that would make Murphy from his “Delirious” stand-up very happy: they got out. Unfortunately, the spirits follow them wherever they go. Ben and Father Kent then get more help from medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish) and Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito), a Tulane professor and historian with a heart condition. With this ragtag team holed up together, can they rid this haunted mansion of the Hatbox Ghost (Jared Leto) who’s controlling 998 harmless ghosts and seeks another soul?

Stanfield is starring in a beautiful story about unprocessed grief and gives a grounded, rather poignant performance with laconic line delivery, swagger, and emotional heft. Glued to his character’s own touching story is the haunted mansion itself and the other characters. Dawson and Dillon bring charm to their mother and son roles, and the rest of the cast mugs its best and shares an easygoing repartee. Haddish is delightful; Wilson’s shtick hits more than not (his attempt to open a secret passage with a torch amuses); and DeVito seems to be channeling The Penguin without any of the prosthetics (“I’m too old to die!” is also a funny line in itself). Even Stanfield and DeVito explaining “The Hatbox Ghost” to a sketch artist (Hasan Minaj) at the police station is one of the funnier bits. Leto is curiously cast as a sunken-eyed ghoul known as “The Hatbox Ghost,” while Jamie Lee Curtis has a pivotal role, though she’s mostly relegated to having her face CG’d inside of a crystal ball as Madame Leota. Then there are head-scratching, cameo-sized speaking parts for Dan Levy and Winona Ryder that don’t enhance the film but make you want more for them.

A mid-film sequence of astral projection captures all along what “Haunted Mansion” should have been: a spooky, exciting, visually inventive funhouse. In fits and starts, the film achieves that magic and always seems to be finding a comfortable groove with its best material but never quite gets there. Sure, Disney’s got to Disney, but what is with so many distracting moments of product placement? Once or twice, it’s a little noticeable, but Amazon, Baskin Robbins, Burger King, CVS, Costco, Yankee Candle, and Zillow all get sold here by an actor. “Haunted Mansion” boasts atmospheric set design, and it should please fans of the ride and scare, not scar, the kids. Besides that, it's too uneven and overlong to be the enjoyable summer-movie ride it ought to be.

Grade: C

Walt Disney Pictures released “Haunted Mansion” (122 min.) in theaters on July 28, 2023.