MOVIE REVIEW

Haunted Mansion, The  (2003)

Starring: Eddie Murphy, Terence Stamp, Jennifer Tilly
Director: Rob Minkoff

Rating: PG

Studio: Walt Disney

Release Date: 11.26.03

Review Posted: 11.26.03

Spoilers: Minor

By Sara M. Fetters

Murphy Lost in Creaky "Mansion"

There was once an extremely talented comedian fresh from “Saturday Night Live.” He took co-starring roles with – at that time – some of the biggest names in comedy, names like Dudley Moore and Dan Aykroyd, stealing movie’s right out from underneath them. Then came Walter Hill ‘s “48Hrs.” with Nick Nolte. Immediately, this bright young dynamo was catapulted to super stardom, and with a tip of a ten-gallon hat everything he touched from then on out turned to comedic gold.

That star was Eddie Murphy, and it is with a grieving heart I must pass on the word of his demise. No, not physically, but comedically, for that shining streaming comet of laugh-inducing thunder who shaped the modern face of movie comedy in the 1980’s and ‘90’s lives no more. That’s right kids, I think I can safely say we won’t be seeing another “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Eddie Murphy Delirious” (a concert film that ranks right up there with Richard Pryor’s best) or “Coming to America” anytime soon.

Don’t get me wrong, Eddie still has that sparkle, but the luster is definitely fading. In fact, the only time he tends to show it nowadays is in a supporting role, like his sublime turn in Steve Martin’s “Bowfinger,” or purely in vocal turns with his hilarious work in both “Mulan” and “Shrek.” But as far as his leading man material is concerned, Murphy’s been a laugh-free lost cause for some time now. And while he still has had financial successes – both “The Nutty Professor II” and “Daddy Day Care” were hits even though they stank – audiences are slowly coming around to the fact this talented comedian isn’t anything like he once was.

I’d like to say this trend comes to an end with Disney’s new family comedy-adventure “The Haunted Mansion.” I’d like to say Eddie is back firing on all cylinders, the old Murphy charisma elevating this based-on-a-theme-park-ride adaptation up to being something special. I’d like to say a lot of things, like my Seattle Supersonics are going to win the NBA championship this season or the United States has a foreign policy that makes sense, but it just isn’t going to happen. Because despite a winning moment here and there, “The Haunted Mansion” has far more in common with “The Country Bears” than it wants to, all allusions to “Pirates of the Caribbean” grandeur left dying in the graveyard. In short, the decline of Eddie Murphy undeniably continues.

Not that this movie didn’t have a shot. The director is Rob Minkoff, the co-director of “The Lion King,” who really proved his metal as a live action family film director with the wondrous “Stuart Little 2” and seems more than up to the task here. He’s put a great supporting cast around Murphy, not the least of which includes Terence Stamp (“Superman II,” “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”), Wallace Shawn (“The Princess Bride,” “Duplex”) and Jennifer Tilly (“Bullets Over Broadway”), and brought in the awesome Oscar-winning talents of Rick Baker (“The Nutty Professor,” “An American Werewolf in London”) to handle the makeup effects. But a tired and flat script by Roger Berenbaum undoes them all. While his writing here doesn’t come close to the crass awfulness of his witless work on “Elf,” the fact “The Haunted Mansion” is only maudlin and not aggravatingly terrible isn’t enough to give it passing marks.

Murphy stars as Jim Evers, one half of Evers & Evers Real Estate with his wife Sara (Marsha Thomason, “Black Knight”), and he’s an arrogantly slapdash salesman obsessed with making that next sale. Sara’s upset with her husband for spending too much time working and not enough time helping raise their two kids, especially after he blows off their anniversary to meet with a couple of potential new clients. To make it up to her, Jim promises to take the whole family to the lake for the weekend. But when Sara gets invited to the fabled Gracie mansion to meet with the owner, the male half of the Evers agency can’t help but make them all stop at the estate on their way out of town.

Soon, they’re dining with Mr. Gracie (Nathaniel Parker, “Othello”) himself, Jim drooling all over the dilapidated manor's sales potential. But nothing is quite what it seems, and when the family is stranded in the mansion due to a thunderous rainstorm it becomes apparent their host and his staff aren’t altogether corporeal. In fact, Gracie has his ghostly eyes fixed squarely on the beautiful Sara, sure she is the reincarnation of his long lost love returned to end the curse that has stranded he and his staff on the mortal plain. It’s now up to Jim and his children to find the secret behind the curse and release the truth, thus saving Sara from a supernatural union with their vaporous host.

Simple enough, and really there isn’t anything too desperately wrong with this scenario. If anything, I liked that Berenbaum grounded “The Haunted Mansion” in such haughty details as right and wrong, life and death, and truth and lies. In a way, it harks back to old school Disney where choices had consequences, and family movies were not afraid to bring up a sensitive subject or two – in this case interracial romance – giving children the benefit of the doubt that they and their parents were mature enough to discuss and handle them together.

If only the adventure he’s wrapped the issues up in were more interesting. The film plods from one scene to the next with mechanical precision, Minkoff trying desperately to camouflage the script’s alphabetic structure with as much visual razzle-dazzle as he can muster. Even Murphy seems lost, mugging his way through scene after scene with a wide-eyed exuberance bordering on the vexatious. It’s all very flat, devoid of any sort of emotional attachment that could make it work. If anything, there is a television sitcom banality to it all, a humdrum been there/done that vibe that is completely inescapable and only missing a laugh track to be complete.

Still, unlike recent Murphy failures like “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” or “I Spy,” “The Haunted Mansion” isn’t a total wipeout. Marc John Jeffers (“Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle”) and Aree Davis – in her feature debut – are perfect as the Evers’ two aggravated children, while Tilly almost rolls off with the movie as a psychic gypsy who’s head resides in a sea of green mist swirling within a crystal ball. Minkoff and Berenbaum fit many of the ride’s more memorable aspects, including the ghoulish waltz and the stone-faced barbershop quartet, into the picture as well, slipping them in much more nicely than I imagined possible. There is also a splendidly macabre chase through a creepy mausoleum, Murphy and the kids being pursued by what must be the ghastliest set of zombies to ever grace a Disney movie. This moment more than any other crystallizes the type of picture “The Haunted Mansion” could have been, making the unrelenting banality of everything else around it that much more difficult to bear.

If only it were all more interesting and not so pedestrian. While there are some great ideas floating around in Berenbaum’s script, the author just couldn’t seem to put them down on paper in a way we haven’t seen a hundred times before. And while Minkoff knows how to make his camera whirl and twirl, it all seems like so much smoke and mirrors to hide the fact nothing is going on behind the movie’s antique doors. As for Murphy, the only thing that seems to be haunted right now is his career, the days of the comedic mastermind long gone seemingly never to be seen again.

Rating: êê  (out of 4)

TOP