An average movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since there was a decent cast involved and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, to be honest, I really had a hard time to care about the damned thing after all. First of all, I thought it was a rather weird move for John Krasinski’s promising directing career. Indeed, with ‘A Quiet Place’, he had launched a successful horror franchise and his next move was to go for… a family feature which was rather bewildering. At least, I have to admit that it was a refreshing and surprising choice and if this movie would have been great, then, he would have outsmarted everybody, especially me. Eventually, Krasinski described it as a live action Pixar movie and it was indeed obvious that it was the vibe he was going for (especially with the opening with the mother dying right away which was pretty much lifted from ‘Up’). Unfortunately, the end-result was just too schmaltzy and, in my opinion, even rather pretentious. I mean, the concept of this girl able to see these imaginary friends had some potential, even if it was still too derivative but the whole idea of having her trying to recouple them with some other kids was just tedious. The fact that they switched idea at some point, that they tried then to recouple them with their original kids who were now grown-ups was actually even worse though. Basically, it felt like they had no idea how to handle these characters so it seemed that they kept trying various ideas until they found something that might work. I think it was also a mistake to include Ryan Reynolds. Indeed, his human character was actually a distraction and it didn’t help that Reynolds gave his usual shtick. I also figured out right away that they would pull ‘The Sixth Sense’ twist almost right away when I first saw him making his character even more useless and underwhelming. I have to admit that I was rather floored to find out that Cailey Fleming was already around 15-16 years old when she made this movie as she seemed to be around the same age as her character was but it was probably the only surprising thing about this movie after all. Anyway, to conclude, I will have admit that the damned thing was rather harmless so I guess it might still be worth a look but there is no doubt that John Krasinski should focus on other things with his future directing projects.