93 min | PG | October 1, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
Gomez packs the family into a black RV and drags them across America to stop the kids from growing up. The road-trip comedy runs the most morbid family in fiction through every cheerful vacation cliche available. The premise is a costume, and the movie never finds the body underneath.
The Addams Family loads into a hearse-black RV and drives across the country. Gomez senses his children pulling away from him, so he hauls the whole clan on a road trip to reconnect. A side plot questions whether Wednesday is even an Addams by blood. The film dresses a standard family-vacation cartoon in gothic costume and hopes the contrast carries it. It does not. The Addams aesthetic exists to mock suburban normalcy, and this movie drops the family into the exact road-comedy template those characters were built to ridicule.
Oscar Isaac voices Gomez as a stream of theatrical enthusiasm, rolling every line in mustache-twirling delight. Charlize Theron gives Morticia a low, unhurried purr that the script rarely lets her use. Chloë Grace Moretz plays Wednesday in a flat monotone that fits the character and starves the scenes of energy at the same time. Nick Kroll turns Uncle Fester into the film’s designated chaos engine and grows exhausting by the second act. Bette Midler barks a few lines as Grandma and disappears. Snoop Dogg voices Cousin Itt in a cloud of unintelligible mumbling that the movie treats as a punchline by itself.
Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan direct from a script credited to four writers, and the seams show in every abrupt detour. The animation renders the characters with rubbery, plastic surfaces that catch light like toys rather than the angular monochrome the property suggests. The directors stage gags at a constant frantic pitch and cut before any joke can breathe. The palette abandons the black-and-grey Addams look for bright theme-park lighting whenever the RV reaches a new stop. Charles Addams drew in shadow and negative space. This film fills every frame with motion and noise and trusts neither.
The movie is built for small children and aims at nothing else. It mistakes volume for comedy and movement for story. The voice cast is stacked with talent the material wastes on cheap sight gags and pop-song needle drops. The Addams Family works when the morbid characters stay deadpan and let the normal world flinch around them. This sequel keeps yanking them into the normal world and asking them to play along. The result is loud, harmless, and forgettable.