Review: LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish can't scare up laughs in 'Haunted Mansion'

“Haunted Mansion” plays like an overlong episode of the classic cartoon “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?”

That in and of itself isn’t damning. Scoob and those meddling kids entered the pop culture zeitgeist for a reason – some of those half-hour shorts were thoroughly entertaining and laced with more than a few hilarious double-entendres.

There are moments when “Mansion” – which stars LaKeith Stanfield (“Atlanta”), an actor with substantial range, Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson and Danny DeVito – is thoroughly entertaining. However, there are not enough of them. Because the film is held hostage by its source material: the Disney parks ride that serves as its basis.

I’m not naïve enough to discount a movie on that basis alone. Such efforts can be pleasantly surprising. Confession time: I walked into “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” another film based on a Disney ride, expecting to be completely bored.

Instead, director Gore Verbinski delivered an instant classic featuring a mesmerizing comedic turn by Johnny Depp.

There’s no such luck with “Haunted Mansion,” which seems more concerned with paying homage to the attraction and throwing every detail on the screen in order to please the ride’s fans than with creating an organic piece of entertainment and allowing it to evolve.

This version represents the second ride for this particular Disney property; the first from 2003 starred Eddie Murphy as a Realtor and suffered a horrifying fate at the box office and courtesy of savage reviews.

Stanfield stars as Ben, a widowed astrophysicist schlubbing his way through life, still mourning his wife’s death.

Part of her life was giving tours to the haunted houses of her hometown New Orleans, a duty Ben assumes in her memory. That career choice brings him to the attention of Father Kent, who talks him into helping Gabbie (Dawson), a single mother, and her son, Travis (Chase Dillon), with a haunted mansion she hopes to turn into a bed-and-breakfast.

Ben soon, reluctantly, assembles a motley crew of ghostbusters that includes a medium named Harriet (Haddish) and a professor (Danny DeVito), who may be the only one who wants to be in the mansion to solve the mystery of the Hatbox Ghost.

The cast is willing and there are some genuinely funny moments in “The Haunted Mansion,” but actual scares are in short supply. Perhaps it is because it’s a Disney film. But here’s the dilemma; films such as “Ghostbusters” managed to be funny and scary without being overly violent.

Ultimately the film’s pedestrian script from Katie Dippold wastes a generally talented cast, dooming this version of “Haunted Mansion” to the same fate as its predecessor – mostly forgotten.

George M. Thomas dabbles in movies and television for the Beacon Journal.

Review

Movie: “Haunted Mansion”

Cast: LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson

Directed by: Justin Simien

Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Rated: PG-13 for some thematic elements and scary action.

Grade: C

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Review: 'Haunted Mansion' forgets the laughs and the scares