Review: ‘Boo!’-benheimer? Disney’s ‘Haunted Mansion’ is just a so-so comedy of manors

Since it made its debut in 1969, the Haunted Mansion ride has been one of Disneyland’s more enjoyable attractions and, if memory serves, one of its most prone to technical difficulties. Having endured several mid-ride breakdowns over the years — meaning the ride broke down, not me — I can attest that there are far worse experiences.

There you sit for a few minutes in your temporarily halted “doom buggy,” a squat, rounded black car that looks like an apple-shaped casket on wheels, listening to the roar of “Grim Grinning Ghosts (The Screaming Song)” while a host periodically interrupts with entreaties to remain seated. Depending on where the ride stops, you might have a decent view of the translucent green specters chasing each other around the dining room. Maybe you’ll have time to study the graveyard epitaphs, or — if you’re really lucky — to marvel at the holographic visitors who’ve stowed away in your buggy. In any event, if you’re like me, you won’t be in a hurry to get going again. The entire ride runs a short nine minutes, and it’s nice to spend more time in its pleasurably spooky, happily air-conditioned world.

The new “Haunted Mansion” movie, though not without its own creaky charms (or air conditioning), has the disadvantage of running rather longer than nine minutes. In the time it would take you to watch this musty live-action nostalgia play, you could theoretically cycle through the original ride at least 10 times and still be able to run out and grab a Dole Whip before the credits roll. Like the ride, the movie is a rickety, silly-sinister vehicle that occasionally stalls and loses momentum. Unlike the ride, it features actors like LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson and Tiffany Haddish, gamely striving to bring the human factor — or at least some semblance of narrative shape — to what would otherwise play like a night at the occult museum.

Jamie Lee Curtis in the movie “Haunted Mansion.”

(Disney)

Make that several nights. One of the quirks of this movie’s swampy Louisiana plantation-style manor is that some of its ghosts — 999 in total — have a pesky habit of following visitors home. Anyone who tries to leave this Haunted Mansion, in other words, inevitably will be forced to return, which sounds like a metaphor for Hollywood reboot fatigue. (This is Disney’s second “Haunted Mansion” movie, arriving two decades after a misbegotten first attempt starring Eddie Murphy.) That’s more or less how Ben (Stanfield), a depressive astrophysicist with an interest in the supernatural, finds himself camping out indefinitely in the mansion’s library with an upbeat doctor, Gabbie (Dawson), and her lonely son, Travis (Chase W. Dillon). It’s a paranormal pajama party with a strict midnight curfew and an ever-expanding guest list.

Soon they’re joined by Owen Wilson as a shifty priest, Danny DeVito as a cranky professor and Tiffany Haddish as an amusingly mountebank-ish medium, all of them enlisted (and in some cases forced) to help figure out why this particular haunting feels more like an infestation. Leaving aside the dull original-owners backstory concocted by the screenwriter Katie Dippold (“The Heat,” “Snatched” and, most saliently, 2016’s “Ghostbusters”), I’m happy to clear up the mystery: Everything we see here — the floating candelabra, the sentient suits of armor, the self-playing pipe organ, the bloodthirsty bride with the beating red heart, Jamie Lee Curtis’ disembodied head, Jared Leto’s freaky grin, the windowless chamber whose walls and paintings stretch like unusually morbid taffy — is a callback of sorts, a fan-service frisson. It’s all there for the predictable sole purpose of rekindling your presumably blissful Disneyland memories.

If you have no such memories, you might find yourself wondering what exactly all the fuss is about, at least when you’re not squinting through the murk, deliberate and otherwise, of the movie’s visually monotonous shadows. “Haunted Mansion” isn’t as much of a digital Disney-ride-inspired eyesore as 2021’s “Jungle Cruise,” mainly because all this cheesily computer-generated ectoplasm is more or less in keeping with the (ahem) spirit of the proceedings, as are the cobwebbed contours of Darren Gilford’s antebellum-chic production design. But because no effort has been expended to make any of this even remotely scary — there are only so many times you can watch Stanfield dodge a flying CGI axe — you might at least hope for a belly laugh or two, or at least a few decent jokes.

Tiffany Haddish, Rosario Dawson, LaKeith Stanfield and Danny DeVito in the movie “Haunted Mansion.”

(Jalen Marlowe)

That wouldn’t seem too far beyond the purview of director Justin Simien, who wrote and directed the sharp academia-set satire “Dear White People” (which he expanded into a Netflix series) and the tonsorial horror-comedy “Bad Hair.” And while there are a few chuckles to be had here, mostly courtesy of Wilson’s gee-willikers delivery, the rest of the cast fares worse, including Haddish, whose bumbling clairvoyant is stuck cracking moldy jokes about PayPal and CVS. New Orleans may be close by, but Haddish is a long way from the Big Easy shenanigans of “Girls Trip,” the sensational 2017 comedy that rightly made her a star.

As it happens, New Orleans was also the chief setting of “The Photograph,” an underseen romantic drama that features one of Stanfield’s finest performances. He taps some of that moody, melancholy languor here as Ben, whose dedication to the paranormal is rooted in his grief over the untimely death of his wife (Charity Jordan). It’d be downplaying the corporate imperatives of “Haunted Mansion” to call it a fitfully moving study of grief and acceptance, or to wrestle too hard over the two different, contradictory reactions it inspires: Death is not to be feared, but life is still too short.