104 min | PG | May 17, 2024 | Paramount Pictures
John Krasinski makes a family film about forgotten imaginary friends. The concept is Pixar-level. The execution is Hallmark-level. Ryan Reynolds cannot save it.
Bea is a twelve-year-old girl staying with her grandmother in New York while her father undergoes heart surgery. She discovers she can see imaginary friends that other people have forgotten. A mysterious man named Cal is already working to reconnect these abandoned IFs with their now-grown kids. The premise is genuinely strong. The idea that imaginary friends persist and suffer when children outgrow them has real emotional potential. The film reaches for that potential and grabs something smaller.
Cailey Fleming plays Bea with earnest vulnerability. She is good. Ryan Reynolds plays Cal with the winking sarcasm he brings to everything and it works against the material. The film needs sincerity. Reynolds delivers irony. The voice cast for the imaginary friends is enormous. Steve Carell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Bradley Cooper, George Clooney, and others voice creatures that appear on screen for moments. The star power is excessive. The character development is minimal. Most IFs are defined by a single visual gag.
Krasinski wrote and directed A Quiet Place with discipline and visual intelligence. This film has neither. The direction is competent but unremarkable. The IFs are designed with visual variety but lack the emotional specificity that makes animated characters resonate. The film gestures at themes of grief and growing up without committing to the darkness those themes require. The father’s surgery creates stakes that the film handles with excessive delicacy.
Inside Out explored the same territory with more courage and more imagination. IF wants to make audiences cry about childhood and loss without confronting either honestly. The final revelation about Bea’s connection to the IFs is telegraphed from the first act. The film is pleasant. Pleasant is not enough when the premise promises wonder.