Back when I trashed Jeff Wadlows “Imaginary”, I stated with the utmost confidence, word for word verbatim that “All bets are off IF will be the better movie about imaginary friends because this is a very low bar to clear.” On that metric alone, I’m glad I was proven right.
Standing on its own metrics though….its kinda just there.
John Krasinski doesn’t completely take the easy way out in his attempts to steady this ship. While not quite methodical in his approach, his directing style is very careful but also loose, very slow on momentum but once it picks up, the stride is hard to lose. That being said, it’s serviceable.
The use of the production design here felt like a missed opportunity; there didn’t feel like a genuine sense of ingenuity to the settings outside the IF retirement home and really, Janusz Kaminski’s elegant cinematography and the competent editing that followed feels like it’s doing much of the work in preventing the scope and scale of that blundering rabbit hole from boxing itself in; despite its cornucopia of CG creations being delightful on the eyes and blending in seamlessly with the outside world and even after a rather well-intended twist near the end that I probably should’ve seen coming, the worldbuilding still feels ramshackle in spite of itself and I never really got a handle on it just when I thought the pieces would start to come together more.
The dialogue that accompanies all this is both middling and pedestrian at once, which is displayed in its humor. It’s obviously not my cup of tea and some of them clearly don’t work but it’s amusing enough without being obnoxious.
Michael Giacchino’s score is a thing of beauty by the way; I was genuinely taken aback by how peppy and lively the music was throughout this entire production even if it can get a tad bit overbearing…..which is unfortunate since the music still has more personality than the main characters. Don’t mistake me: the acting is decent for what it is. Cailey Fleming does eventually hit her stride by the time she’s paired with Ryan Reynolds, who effortlessly steamrolls over everyone here, and they’re all but barely any the characters outside Bea and Cal really stand out, specifically the IF’s.
Somewhere, someone will say this story is a reverent mixture of Pan’s Labyrinth meets Roger Rabbit. You ask me, this is a live action adaptation of Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends (the real ones will remember that one) laced with the fleeting sentimentality of a modern Pixar flick. Its simple cloying nature might be too saccharine for some and blatantly heavy-handed for others and you won’t catch me disagreeing in those regard; yet its important to keep in mind one of the primary functions of imaginary friends in movies is to maintain a power of influence over our protagonists and the world they inhabit regardless of genre. John Krasinski’s writing uses that predictable formality to decent effects, but only just. Each scene held some significant importance to the overarching narrative at play with only maybe two separate scenes feeling like filler, its connective tissue is far from haphazard and thankfully, it knows better than to overplay on viewers' emotions, avoiding a purgatory that’s very VERY easy for kids films to pitfall into.
You can say I’ve grown attached to stories regarding adults reclaiming their inner child because there’s so many ways to visually and thematically piece together such a simple narrative and this one is of exception. What starts as a cute story about finding new homes for old IFs eventually shifts its focus while never losing the point, morphing and digivolves into a tale of self-actualization and hope. We’re all living in a time period these days where it kinda sucks to be alive. We all lose someone we care about all the time but add that on top of bills that need to be paid, parental aid that has to be applied to kids in need of care, jobs to go to, amongst many other terrifying realities out there in the world and everyone has a coping mechanism. Often, it’s easy for us to forget how important it is to retaining some semblance of hopeful imagination in a society that often jumps at the chance to kill it every chance it gets. But the choice to highlight how important that wondrous sense of optimism is can’t not get you all warm and fuzzy in your tum-tum.
Unfortunately, all of this gets delivered with a lot of sledgehammer subtlety and I wish I could say this narrative gave off more imagination than “Imaginary” but it’s lacking in that department too; everything feels so tame here. Now it’s because it’s so safe in its execution that it makes itself more digestible to families but nothing we see here is going to leave much of an impact on anyone other than its well-intended message….
….and even that is something you can get in more daring kids films than this. Especially when you consider how long it takes to actually set up its premise and how nebulously lenient the rules were. Not having much depth to its themes or the lack of consistency with them also rear their misshapen heads a lot as the writing can’t really settle on knowing what it wants to say about imaginary companions or the people who create them.
While genuinely disappointing in some aspects, IF is a movie that’s rather difficult to turn away completely; I admire it more than I like it. Plus, it is the better movie than Imaginary so that counts for something, right? Right?
