The basic idea this time is that Wednesday is, like all young adolescents, just so embarrassed by her corny family, and she wishes she wasn't related to them. ![]() If anything, this film's story is even worse than the first film's, since it involves so much more effort. Which isn't to say that The Addams Family 2 isn't neutered in its own ways. It's even strongly implied that deadpan tween psychopath Wednesday Addams (Chloƫ Grace Moretz) causes a man to plummet to his death by dropping him into a canyon, which feels almost too nasty, but given the choice, I'd rather have this than the neutered whatever-it-was from 2019. And much of this has to do with it correcting that one fatal flaw of The Addams Family: it has a nasty streak. The Addams Family 2, a sequel that presumably must have been desired by somebody (as it turns out, the 2019 film was a pretty enormous hit relative to its budget, and the new one has been having a quietly potent box-office run throughout October 2021), isn't good as an adaptation of the cartoons, and it's not good on its own merits as an animated feature, but I have to give credit where credit is due: it is an unambiguous improvement over its predecessor. The Addams Family '19 just plops Addams's character designs into one of the most dismally generic CG-animation kids' movie scenarios on the books. It's a children's movie, and that of course puts a ceiling on it, but even 1960s network television was able to put a genuine undercurrent of antisocial weirdness behind the stock domestic situations. The 2019 animated version of The Addams Family is remarkably free of any positive elements, including the one thing that should be considered the non-negotiable baseline for any media adaptation of Charles Addams's macabre New Yorker cartoons: a genuine streak of cruel morbidity.
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