‘Haunted Mansion’ review: Dead on arrival

PLOT In New Orleans, a single mother tries to rid her house of ghosts.

CAST LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish

RATED PG-13 (mildly scary moments)

LENGTH 2:02

WHERE Area theaters

BOTTOM LINE Despite a lively cast and a promising director, this Disney comedy barely has a pulse.

If youโ€™re a fan of The Haunted Mansion, Disneyโ€™s kitschy-gothy theme-park ride, you might be looking forward to the studioโ€™s big-screen adaptation. โ€œHaunted Mansionโ€ arrives with a hip young director, an eclectic cast and a mission to bring a little color to a genre that usually hinges on dead Anglo-Saxon aristocrats. Whatโ€™s not to love?

Beware, foolish mortals: โ€œHaunted Mansionโ€ canโ€™t hold a floating candelabra to the original ride, or even the widely panned film version from 2003. That movie, you may remember, already scored a few points for diversity by casting Eddie Murphy as a real estate broker. This reboot isnโ€™t a radical departure or an ambitious reinvention. It just adds a sloppy new coat of paint to an existing intellectual property.

LaKeith Stanfield plays Ben, a New Orleans widower and tour guide with a bleak outlook. โ€œLife is dirt,โ€ he barks as he leads visitors through his famously haunted city. When a single mother, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), and her shy 9-year-old, Travis (Chase W. Dillon), move into a ghost-plagued pile called Gracey Manor, they seek help from Ben, who happens to be a former astrophysicist and the inventor of a specter-detecting camera.

Would you believe the screenwriter is Katie Dippold, of โ€œGhostbusters?โ€ She comes up with a mixed bag of characters here, including Father Kent (a laid-back Owen Wilson), the French Quarter psychic Harriet (an uneven Tiffany Haddish) and Tulane University professor Bruce Davis (an excitable Danny DeVito). The movieโ€™s attempts to reverse-engineer the ride into a narrative feel even less inspired: Jamie Lee Curtis squeezes herself into the role of Madame Leota โ€” the…

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