IF - Mark Reviews Movies

IF, Paramount Pictures

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2024

There's a pleasant concept desperately in need of some narrative shaping in IF. Writer/director John Krasinski's story revolves around a 12-year-old girl who suddenly discovers she can see people's imaginary friends, known as IFs. With that premise set, the filmmaker just hopes that some quirky creatures, several comedy bits, and a heaping of sentimentality will carry this tale.

They don't, even if the third act of this story becomes surprisingly affecting—if only because that's around the time Krasinski finally makes the whole point of this story clear. Until then, it feels oddly episodic and emotionally removed.

What we learn from the start is that Bea (Cailey Fleming) lost her mother to cancer at a young age, and some years later, her father (played by Krasinski) is in the hospital awaiting heart surgery. Bea's worried, of course, even if she tries not to show it and gently scolds her dad for trying to lighten the mood whenever she visits him. She's not a kid anymore, Bea insists, but dad keeps up the jokes on those occasions when the movie has to remind us how much it's trying to tug on our heartstrings without really earning a reaction.

The movie's other premise is better, at least, although it's just as underdeveloped. While staying with her grandmother (played by Fiona Shaw), Bea hears strange noises in her room and in an upstairs apartment. Following the trail, she spots a stranger sneaking into a child's bedroom across the street.

Some amount of credit is due to Michael Giacchino's bouncy score for leveling out how odd, creepy, or downright sinister this scene could look and play otherwise. Yes, the stranger, named Cal, is played by Ryan Reynolds, who can mostly get away with the sight of a grown man tiptoeing around a little girl's room by making it all into an innocent-enough joke.

Still, the whole conceit of this story, as Bea and Cal start traveling the city and visiting fantastical places, should serve as a good conversation-starter for parents to talk to their kids about not following strange adults to unspecified locations, no matter how funny they may be or nice they may seem. By the end, the movie offers another important lesson, although to explain it would be to give away a twist that's not much of one.

Anyway, the gimmick is that Cal is a sort of wrangler and matchmaker for IFs whose children have outgrown and forgotten them. One is a large, fluffy, and purple creature named Blue (voice of Steve Carrell), who wants to be another kid's friend but has never succeeded in even being seen by a different child. That's the rub, apparently, in these fantasy rules. IFs are created from the imaginations of children, and then, they're forced to live a lonely, melancholy existence with other forgotten creatures. Maybe the reason Krasinski keeps even the notion of a plot at bay for so long is because to really consider the nature of the IFs is to encounter little but despair.

It's better, apparently, just to keep meeting new ones as a distraction from the underlying misery and the absence of much momentum in the narrative. Bea, whom Cal and Blue and old-timey cartoon character Blossom (voice of Phoebe Waller-Bridge) believe could be the "chosen one" to unite discarded IFs with new children, finds herself meeting a couple dozen or so.

Some are routine, like the teddy bear founder (voiced by the late Louis Gossett Jr). of a retirement home for IFs, and others are generically odd, like a slime monster (voice of Keegan-Michael Key) and a floating bunch of bubbles (voice of Awkwafina) and a superhero dog (voice of Sam Rockwell). The cleverest of the bunch are probably a spy named Cosmo (voice of Christopher Meloni), whose just a trench coat with big eyes floating in shadow, and an ice cube (voice of Bradley Cooper) in a glass of water. That IF came into existence because his kid lived in Arizona and was thirsty one day, and as for the rest, they're mainly notable for just how many famous actors Krasinski was able to gather for a very short day in a recording booth.

Despite the talent—both vocal and on-camera (Fleming is quite good)—and some imaginative visual effects, the defining characteristic of the movie is how much it meanders, moving from gag to maudlin scene without much sense of where the story wants to go or how it intends to get there. Once the notion of attempting to reunite IFs with their now-adult children emerges, Krasinski finds the kernel of a theme with some genuine resonance. It's not entirely convincing, of course, since the idea arrives too late to do anything of consequence with it, but there is something to the notion that we never stop needing some kind of comfort and assurance, no matter how "grown up" we may be.

Even so, IF is just too unsure of itself for that last-minute boost to have much of an effect. It's an odd movie but not nearly weird enough for the comedic elements to work, and the story's emotional core is too manipulative for the majority of it to feel sincere.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products