In England, there’s a tradition of doing theatrical release film versions of popular television programs and taking the characters out of their familiar settings.
Examples include the cast of the department store comedy Are You Being Served? being held hostage on a cruise ship, or the prisoner star of Porridge accidentally escaping his familiar cell and spending the rest of the movie trying to break back in. Sometimes this works to make for an interesting film but more often, it does not.
Addams Family 2 is a similar case in that we quickly get our protagonists out of their dark, familiar, creepy, kooky house and off on a cross country trip that has the original mysterious, spooky, and all together ooky family stopping at the beach, Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and…Sausalito? Everything is bright and shiny and colorful and the Addams’ seem terribly out of place.
The script, however, is just so darn funny that it saves the day!
The Addams Family members—in case anyone doesn’t know—were created as nameless macabre characters in the magazine panels of cartoonist Charles Addams way back in the late 1930s. It was only when they were translated to television in the 1960s that they were finally given names—Gomez, the insanely rich and well-dressed, crazy-eyed, and eccentric man of the house; his pale, slinky, gothic wife, Morticia; the bald and blissfully addlepated but somewhat magical Uncle Fester; the witchy matriarch, Grandmama; and the children, Pugsley and Wednesday, the latter of whom is her mother done over as a mini-me. Oh, and there’s also the giant groaning butler, Lurch, the ever-present helping hand, Thing, and sometimes the inexplicable and indecipherable Cousin Itt.
All of these roles were cast to perfection on the suitably black and white TV series that ran only two seasons in the mid-sixties but later spawned two different cartoon series, a comic book, a couple of TV-movie revivals, a rebooted TV version that lasted longer than the original, a blockbuster Broadway musical, two live-action major motion pictures, and most recently the 2019 computer-animated feature film, to which Addams Family 2 is the pandemic-delayed sequel.
Gomez decides to squeeze most of the fam into a rickety old camper that billows purple smoke in an effort to bond everyone while on a cross-country trip. He’s also attempting to evade a man who literally informs them that Wednesday and another child were switched at birth! Wednesday becomes the real star of the movie as she becomes convinced that Morticia and Gomez are not her real parents and she sets off to discover her true identity.
Throughout the film, something weird is progressively happening to Fester. At first, it’s subtle, then less so. In time, the other characters start bringing it up. The running gag of it is funny but in the long run, we find it’s also been setting up more than just humor all along.
The very Addams-like dark one-liners are abundant but there are also some completely unexpected bits, the funniest coming when Wednesday and Lurch find themselves potentially in peril in a biker bar in the middle of the desert. The first part of the joke is telegraphed but that just makes the goofy second part, which blindsides completely, even more laugh-out-loud hilarious!
Most of the humor seems quick and natural, with the out-of-character settings actually offering the chance for some new and unexpected laughs. There are jokes for long-time fans and jokes on current name performers for hip kids. There is, however, what comes across as an unfortunate bit of fat-shaming near the end. Other than that, though, it’s generally a real hoot.
All the characters get at least one showcase scene, although Grandmama, who stays home (but hardly alone) a bit less. But make no mistake, this is Wednesday’s movie, and actress Chloe Grace Moretz, although now grown-up from her days as Hit-Girl in the Kick-Ass movies, is dead-perfect (pun intended) at voicing the character, proving she’s not one of the many child stars whose talent seems to mysteriously vanish as they get older. She even manages to imbue her cold, deadpan readings with subtle little bits of emotion here and there, a point that was probably unnecessary but which adds unexpectedly to her performance.
With the exception of Finn Wolfhard, reportedly replaced as Pugsley by Javon Walton due to an attack of puberty between films leaving him with a deeper voice, the cast carries over from the previous movie. Charlize Theron as Morticia is suitably sepulchral. Oscar Isaac’s Gomez channels Raul Julia from the ‘90s films more than the manic John Astin from TV but Nick Kroll’s Uncle Fester is most definitely a wonderful riff on the series’ Jackie Coogan as opposed to the movies’ Christopher Lloyd.
Bette Midler and Snoop Dogg are also unlikely cast carry-overs from the previous film.
The animation is top-notch. I continue to be impressed by how much computer animation improves from one project to the next and can only imagine what things will look like 10, 20, 30 years from now! There’s so much detail in some scenes that I ran back over them a couple of times just to take it all in.
The musical score is an eclectic mix of classic pop (Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald) and more modern styles of songs and musical pieces, some of which, presumably, were done just for this movie. Everything works, though, as even the music that didn’t personally appeal to my tastes fit the scenes and that’s what counts.
In the end, though, it’s the characters who are important here. A film like this—especially a sequel—can only ever be as good as its script stays to its characters. And these ARE the Addams Family members who have become so indelibly imprinted on society’s collective brains for more than 80 years now. You know them already. You care about them. Just thinking of them makes you want to snap your fingers. Oh, and just so you don’t think it was left out, both at the beginning and the end there are lovely segues into Vic Mizzy’s memorable finger-snapping Addams Family theme, as necessary here as John Barry’s James Bond theme to a new 007 picture.
Guaranteed Halloween season fun for adults and children alike. So get a witch’s shawl on, a broomstick you can crawl on, and run to pay a call on…Addams Family 2!
Booksteve recommends.
* * * * *
Produced by Gail Berman, Conrad Vernon ,Danielle Sterling ,Alison O’Brien
Screenplay by Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, Ben Queen, Susanna Fogel
Based on Characters Created by Charles Addams
Directed by Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon
Starring Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Nick Kroll,
Javon Walton, Snoop Dogg, Bette Midler, Bill Hader, Wallace Shawn
