If
[info headline="Release date"]7 December 2018[/info]
[info headline="Language"]English, Hindi[/info]
[info headline="IMDb Rating"]7.4[/info]
[info headline="Genre"]Action, Fantasy, Science Fiction[/info]
[info headline="Cast"]truong van, nhu y, Patrick Wilson[/info]
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If you're lucky enough to attend an early screening of John
Krasinski's new film, "IF," you may be greeted with a short
introduction by the writer/director, asserting that the film is expressly for
all the "girl dads" out there. Having now seen it, that much is true:
despite its family-friendly brief, "IF" is less for kids than for the
adults of kids -- the girl dads, if you will -- who want something that feels a
little more mature than "Minions" but doesn't scare the kids away.
Far from it; it might just bore them to tears.
It's a bold shift for Krasinski, who's already transitioned
from sitcom lead to successful director with the "Quiet Place"
series, and yet, looking at the man himself, it makes perfect sense. This is
the guy who started a little feel-good news show from his house during the
pandemic (that he then sold to ViacomCBS for a presumed truckload of money),
after all. He's the kind of all-American aw-shucks new dad who dipped his toe
into the horror genre, and now wants to make a fun movie that his children can
watch.
The results, such as they are, play out like a half-baked
live-action adaptation of a Pixar picture, from the "Monsters,
Inc"-like structure of the IF world and the dramedic coming-of-age tales
of "Inside Out" and "Up." The opening credits even evoke
"Up," playing gauzy home movies of the rhythms of a playful, happy
family—with Krasinski as the patriarch—ostensibly shot by a DV camera but which
looks suspiciously like grainy, professional-grade film stock. When films use
this kind of device, only one thing can come -- death. Not just once but twice:
When we catch up with Krasinski's daughter, Bea (Cailey Fleming), she's still
in mourning over the offscreen death of her mother some time ago, which is now
compounded by her father staying at the hospital awaiting heart surgery. (We're
never privy to the details: he just says he has a "broken heart,"
which is a nifty case study for the film's simple, cloying nature.) The trauma
clearly eats away at her, despite Krasinski's quirked-up, obnoxious attempts to
cheer her up in the hospital room.
In the meantime, Bea stays with her equally effervescent
grandmother (Fiona Shaw, one of the film's highlights) at her old, creaky
apartment building. It's while there that she suddenly develops the ability to
see people's imaginary friends (or IFs, as the film so proudly dubs them), and
gets looped into an adventure involving her grandmother's downstairs neighbor,
the cynical IF whisperer Calvin (Ryan Reynolds). You see, he's been running a
kind of matchmaking service for IFs whose kids have stopped believing in them;
once they do, you usually get put out to pasture in a kind of pastel retirement
home. Bea, eager for something to do (and believe in), sets herself to the task
of helping Calvin save the IFs by giving them someone to believe in them.
That's the loose framework upon which Krasinski's paper-thin
script rests, one that gestures broadly at a kind of mechanical worldbuilding
but soon throws its hands up in the air and greedily chases one heartstring
after another. For a kid's adventure, it's surprisingly dour and sentimental,
chucking laugh-out-loud jokes for a patient sense of melancholy. That may work
well for the young dads in the audience, but it's gotta bore kids to tears.
Its early stretches see Krasinski using the suspenseful eye
he developed during "A Quiet Place" to fascinating kid-horror effect:
Janusz Kaminski shoots the winding staircase of grandma's apartment like it's
the Overlook Hotel, and one early spooky moment shows us a kid's-eye view of
how creepy a strange old woman leering at you in the hallway can be. There's
something of Guillermo del Toro's more sentimental work in some of these
moments, building a world where imagination can be just as much a threat as comfort.
But then we get to the IFs and their dilemma, where most of
"IF" loses its steam. The creatures themselves are hardly much to
write home about: they take whatever form their kids conceived, from
fire-breathing dragons to walking, talking, self-roasting marshmallows, all
voiced by a murderer's row of "that guy" guest voices that'll leave
you reaching for your phone to pull up IMDb right after.
Sure, they're technically impressive to look at, but they're
bereft of character or whimsy. That's especially true for the film's central
IF, Blue (Steve Carell), a purple, snaggle-toothed furball resembling the
Grimace as subjected to years of British dentistry. Rather than play him with
any kind of arched eyebrow, Carell gives a surprisingly workmanlike
performance, a right shame given the verbal dexterity that lets him own wild
animated characters like Gru.
The human cast fares little better, especially Reynolds, who
coasts through this thing with the half-hearted zeal of someone sick of
repeating the same Deadpool schtick. It almost feels redundant to cast him here
since he functions as a kind of stand-in for Krasinski as the "fun
dad" he's always wanted to be; instead, Calvin exists primarily as a
smarmy sidekick, a fellow cynic who nonetheless helps the IFs on their mission.
Then there's Fleming herself, a waifish young girl who rises to the occasion in
a few Big Moments near the end but who largely gets little to do besides pout
and absorb information.
The mechanics of the IFs also beggar belief and change on a
dime depending on which lazy heartstring Krasinski wants to pull next. The
script can't seem to decide how they really work: Do they disappear once
forgotten about, or are they put in a home? Is the plan to rehome them to new
kids, or get their now-grown adult companions to believe in them again? What's
the plan from there? All immaterial questions for the presumed kiddie audience,
but it's easy to get lost in the shoddy mechanics of the thing when the product
as is is this listless and humorless. By the end, you get the distinct feeling
that all of this sturm und drang is in service to stakes that, all told, are
exceedingly minimal.
Occasionally, Krasinski lands on a neat idea or a perfect
scene: A kaleidoscopic chase through an IF retirement home that Bea is changing
with her imagination (complete with Busby Berkeley riffs and Reynolds climbing
through an oil painting); Shaw's character remembering her love of ballet while
her former IF (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) dances alongside just out of sight. But
for every one of these, we get another tired scene with half-hearted performers
rotely asserting the plot, or trotting out cloying platitudes like "The
most important stories we tell are the ones we tell ourselves." That's to
say nothing of the film's musical choices, the last of which is so on-the-nose,
so egregious, that Wes Anderson should sue for plagiarism.
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