An average movie

Since I did enjoy ‘The Conjuring’ franchise, I thought I might as well check this spin-off/prequel. Well, to be honest, I wasn’t really impressed by the damned thing. The first issue was that, if the Annabelle doll in ‘The Conjuring’ was a nice prop, however, that’s just what it was, a prop and not an actual character, and to build a whole movie (and by now, even a whole franchise) around her was rather misguided in my opinion. Indeed, the evil doll genre is actually seriously limited because there are basically only two ways to tackle this genre. Either, like in ‘Child’s Play’, you go for a living doll which can speak and kill people but the end-result is always pretty much laughable. The second option, which they chose for this movie, is to keep the doll completely inanimate which is definitely a wiser choice. Still, even if the doll remains creepy, there is nothing much thrilling about a doll sitting on a bookshelf through the whole duration of a movie so it still didn’t really work. Another issue was that, while Ed and Lorraine Warren were quite charismatic, John and Mia Form were maybe cute and charming but I’m afraid they were also really bland and boring. Concerning the rest of the movie, well, there were a couple of decent jump scares but the story was just really generic and predictable and the ending was, in my opinion, just way too random. Anyway, to conclude, even if I have seen worse, I thought it was still a rather weak spin-off and I don’t think it is really worth a look, except maybe if you are a really die-hard fan of the genre.