Quick Synopsis: The Addams Family drive across the country, Wednesday thinks she’s not a proper member of the family, somewhere there’s an evil scientist.

I have seen the first one of these, but I didn’t review it for this site. If I had it would have just been me shouting the word “nooooooooooooo” for a few minutes. I had multiple issues with that film, none of which have been really fixed in the sequel. There has been a slight improvement in character design. The first one had almost every human character look more like a bratz doll, every step making it look like they’re going to break an ankle. The human characters look a bit more human here, but there’s still something wrong about them.

The casting is still wrong, but also weirdly right. Charlize Theron and Oscar Isaac would be absolutely perfect in a live action version, but having just their voices feels wrong, especially when the way the characters look doesn’t really seem to suit them. None of this is helped obviously by the casting of the live action ones in the 90s being near perfect. Occasionally a film has one or two perfect castings, those ones had the fortune to have the perfect Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, and Uncle Fester. So any castings will be compared to those, and are unlikely to come off favourably.

Some castings are just the wrong choice. Nick Kroll as Fester for example is just not a good choice. Know who would have been a better choice? Danny DeVito. It would be much less annoying a voice than Krolls is. Also, as much as I love Chloe Grace Moretz, her Wednesday leaves a lot to be desired. Instead of coming off as calm and calculated, she just comes off as flat and bored.

As you can tell by now, I did not enjoy this film. I feel part of that is because it never FEELS like an Addams Family movie. It feels like an animated movie starring them. Like it’s trying way too hard to be cool, way too much music aimed at a younger audience. And yes, I do know the 90s series had MC Hammer in it, but that was mainly restricted to “a song played at some point”. It didn’t do with him what this film does with Snoop Dogg as Cousin It: have him dropped into the plot by private jet, do absolutely nothing, get lifted off again, and then appear at the end to do a rap. You could remove his scenes entirely and you wouldn’t notice they’re not there. They add absolutely nothing to the narrative.

Well I say narrative, it’s mostly “stuff happening”. The plot (that Wednesday might not be an Addams) is predicated almost entirely on Fester juggling with the babies in the hospital, causing a possible mix-up. But the villain, how does he know this? He doesn’t. All of the things that convince Wednesday that she doesn’t belong to the family are things out of the villains control (not just the juggling babies, but also a DNA hair test Wednesday performs coming up “no relation” because Gomez wears a wig). Unless those things happen, the plot doesn’t move forward, but he has no idea those things will happen, he just lucks out. The screenplay is based almost entirely on you not thinking about it for a second, and just hoping you’ll go along with the lazy nature of it.

Great films inspire you to ask questions. The only question I have after this film is: Why?