Disney's latest, starring a tame Eddie Murphy, can't decide whether it's family-friendly or too frightening for kids.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published November 26, 2003
[Photos: Buena Vista Pictures]
Jim Evers (Eddie Murphy) and son Michael (Marc John Jefferies) happen upon a barbershop quartet of marble busts in The Haunted Mansion.
THE HAUNTED MANSION: Jim Evers (Eddie Murphy) tries to reason with a zombie in this Disney flick with a split personality.
Disney's renovation of The Haunted Mansion from theme park attraction to a movie is everything one expects from such a project and, for the first hour at least, considerably less. Director Rob Minkoff creates an extended tease, never letting the audience forget that something supernatural is happening but taking his time to show it off.
Instead, we get Eddie Murphy playing another workaholic father, a cheesy real estate agent cracking tame jokes that the comedian would have dissed during his dirtier, funnier, younger days. How the most electrifying comic of the 1980s devolved into Fred MacMurray is something pop culturists will fret about until he dies, but not much longer. The personality change is cutting into his posterity, if not his bank account.
Murphy plays Jim Evers, a materialistic real estate agent whose insincere smile says it all for this character. Jim's business partner and wife, Sara (Marsha Thomason), is slightly less greedy, meaning she would like to take a brief vacation with Jim and their children, Michael (Marc John Jefferies) and Megan (Aree Davis). But there's a detour along the way, an appointment to sell a decaying property known as Gracey Mansion.
The Disney park ride of the same name doesn't have a plot, so Haunted Mansion screenwriter David Berenbaum created a macabre back story. Gracey Mansion is haunted by the ghosts of servants and two lovers who, apparently in Romeo and Juliet fashion, killed themselves two centuries ago. Sara is a dead ringer for the dead woman, and Master Gracey (Nathaniel Parker) believes that making her his bride will lift the curse of purgatory and let everyone go to heaven.
Along the way, the Evers family gets information from the mansion's eerie butler, Ramsley (Terence Stamp), a pair of domestics (Wallace Shawn, Dina Waters) and Madame Leota, an easy gig for Jennifer Tilly, since only her head appears inside a fog-shrouded glass globe. Tilly almost steals the show from that position, which says a lot about the script.
Things don't get interesting until Jim and the kids are whisked into a carriage drawn by a skeletal horse. For a few minutes, the theme park version of Gracey Mansion comes alive with familiar sights of waltzing specters, dueling or hitchhiking ghosts and, most memorably, a barbershop quartet of marble busts answering every question in perfect harmony. Then comes a visit to a mausoleum, where ghastly, decomposed corpses chase the Evers clan. Some images and themes may be too intense for small children, or too derivative for anyone who enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean and The Frighteners.
That's the movie's recurring problem, straddling the line between family-friendly Pablum and the terror these circumstances deserve. Parents will be indulging childish whims while children nervously cover their eyes. The Haunted Mansion isn't bad, but it's too chicken to muster some better boos.
The Haunted Mansion
Grade: B-
Director: Rob Minkoff
Cast: Eddie Murphy, Terence Stamp, Nathaniel Parker, Marsha Thomason, Jennifer Tilly, Wallace Shawn, Dina Waters, Marc John Jefferies, Aree Davis
Screenplay: David Berenbaum
Rating: PG; scary images, mild profanity, mature themes including suicide and murder
