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THE CANTERVILLE GHOST (2023)
Director: Kim Burdon Cast: The voices of Emily Carey, Stephen Fry, Freddie Highmore, David Harewood, Meera Syal, Jakey Schiff, Bennett Miller, Imelda Staunton, Toby Jones, Miranda Hart, Hugh Laurie MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:29 Release Date: 10/20/23 (limited) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 19, 2023 A clever gimmick succumbs to broad humor, inconsistent animation, and a third act that becomes too hectic in The Canterville Ghost. The promise of the setup is to be expected, perhaps, since the movie is based on an Oscar Wilde short story, but the prestige of the source material only makes this adaptation even more disappointing. The gimmick involves the ghost who has haunted a stately manner somewhere in England for about 300 years. He's Simon de Canterville (voice of Stephen Fry), whose spirit has successfully terrified every inhabitant of the manor to flee the residence. The ghost meets his match, though, in a family of Americans, who seem simply curious about the quaintness of a phantom trying to haunt an old mansion and more annoyed by Simon's imposition on their lives than frightened by his phantasmagorical shenanigans. It's a good joke, simply because of the twisted subversion of expectations for such a tale. Director Kim Burdon and the animators give it some colorful life, although the occasionally choppy computer animation undoes some of the momentum of the more elaborate gags. In the same way, the narrative itself comes across as uncertainly assembled, since the story really is more or less a single joke looking for—but not necessarily in need of—a plot. The family member at the center of it is Virginia Otis (voice of Emily Carey), a spunky teenage girl who wears trousers (much to the ghost's dismay) and has a mind for adventure. Her father Hiriam (voice of David Harewood) is a scientist, who wants to study the ghost and has no intentions of leaving, and Virginia's mother Lucretia (voice of Meera Syal) is also here, offended to find the spirit of a man in her bedroom and hoping to throw a grand ball without any otherworldly interference. Virginia's younger twin brothers (voiced by Jakey Schiff and Bennett Miller) are pranksters who scare Simon more often than he manages to startle them. Despite a very short running time of about 80 minutes without credits, Giles New and Kieron Self's screenplay attempts to do too much with the thin material. There's the family and their concerns—little of them actually having to do with the ghost until later. There's the introduction of the Duke of Cheshire (voice of Freddie Highmore, doing his best to add a bit of personality to, like every other one here, a stock character), who's instantly smitten with Virginia and, being an ancestor of the ghost's mortal foe, who becomes the target of Simon's ire. The local reverend (voiced by Toby Jones and with a name coming from a more famous Wilde work) and his wife (voiced by Miranda Hart) figure into this, too, mainly because the wife is an amateur ghost hunter. She has an arsenal of equipment that feels entirely out of place in the period setting, makes sure that a couple of sequences includes the alleged spectacle of their use, and lets the twin boys run an anachronistic joke about busting ghosts into the ground. There comes a point at which the filmmakers seem defeated by the simple but promising idea at the core of this tale, and in order to compensate for the perceived deficit (or just to pad the story), we get a joy ride in a car, all of the ghost-hunting stuff, and Simon's chaotic sabotage of the party, which has him apparently, in a sharp left turn of tone, trying to murder the heir of his old enemy. Simon's tragic back story, as well as his penchant for quoting William Shakespeare, doesn't do much to give him a personality, either, and Fry's vocal performance matches the generic nature of the character. We even get a reunion between Fry and Hugh Laurie, who voices a mysterious figure in the estate's walled-off garden, but it's a bit too little of Fry and Laurie to really matter. Even so, there are a few bright spots—far between the routine of the plot and the awkward attempts to add more than is necessary, though. One sequence, which details Simon's past, is a striking shift in animation style, using flattened backdrops, akin to pieces of a stage set, and two-dimensional variations of the character design. The basic premise is amusing, and when the movie embraces its nature as a more kid-friendly horror story with a funny hook, there's a certain charm to it that helps one overlook the movie's obvious technical limitations. The more pressing limitations of The Canterville Ghost are ones of the filmmakers' imaginations, resulting in a bland and uninspired animated comedy. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for thematic elements, peril and some violence)
