The New Orleans setting and vibe is a promising start to Disney's reboot of their theme-park property, as a mother and young son move into a, well, haunted mansion, and a dissolute 'ghost photographer', quirky priest, out-there medium and a professor all become bound to the house and try to solve its past mysteries in order to be released from it. The fundamental issue, as with the previous movie iteration, is that it wants to be so child-friendly that it is not remotely scary and the comedy is beyond twee, rendering the whole enterprise bland and somewhat uninteresting, in spite of a solid cast (Rosario Dawson, Danny DeVito, LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson and even Jamie Lee Curtis). The film is saddled with an over-talky script, a numbingly relentless melodramatic score and a lot of murky visuals. It is not that a PG-13 movie cannot provide requisite scares; maybe this incarnation should have concentrated more on creating genuine thrills and chills rather than a convoluted and elongated backstory.
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