The Addams Family 2: The nightmare continues

Charles Addams’s one-panel cartoons about a Gothic family began appearing in The New Yorker during the 1930s. In the intervening years, The Addams Family, as they came to be known, have spawned a popular 1964 sitcom, more than one cartoon series, a Broadway musical, Scooby-Doo crossovers, a much-loved, exquisitely cast 1991 movie and its sequel, Addams Family Values.

It’s a durable creation. But can the franchise survive another instalment in its latest ghastly incarnation?

If the first hideously designed Addams Family (2018) animation left unamused audiences singing “they’re creaky and they’re crappy, they’re altogether lacking”, this sequel aims (and lands) even lower.

Often it feels like a series of incongruous responses provided by studio apparatchiks to the unlovely question; “What’s cool with the kids these days?” The answers: Breakdancing. Megan Thee Stallion. Gloria Gaynor. Maluma.

Two directors and four credited screenwriters signed off on a lazy screenplay that a starry cast and an Oscar-winner can do little to enliven.

Wednesday, the strongest character, is wisely pushed to the forefront of a muddle of unwise subplots, including a cross-country road trip, switched-at-birth identities, and a Silicon Valley Dr Moreau.

Broadly speaking the film runs thusly: fearful that he’s losing his gloomy teenage daughter (Chloë Grace Moretz), Gomez (Oscar Isaac) bundles his family into a steampunk RV for a tour of America’s “darkest secrets”, an itinerary that includes Salem, Sleepy Hollow, Death Valley, and Miami.

The gags – partying granny, random lavatory sightings, teenage girls who say things like “OMG totes selfie” – are lamentable. The animation looks horrid. Snoop Dogg, Bette Midler, and Wallace Shawn are all criminally wasted.

The Gothicism that hitherto defined the clan has given way to the twin nightmares of relatability and four-quadrant striving.

“The horror; the horror”, as Marlon Brando says in a film that is funnier than this one.