Haunted Mansion

We all know the feeling at a theme park when you’ve been on a ride and immediately want to jump on again. In Disney’s case, it just can’t get enough of its Haunted Mansion, a venerable ghost house experience that was first built at its theme park in 1969. It has had two goes at it before - the critically drubbed Eddie Murphy vehicle from 2003 and a Muppet version from 2021 that went straight to Disney+.

If anything, it feels like the studio has doubled down, expanding the ten-minute ride into a two-hour film - you can’t help but do the maths and figure out it might struggle to add up despite successful precedents like the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise.

But given that the original ride is a basic ghost train, this ought to be a grand opportunity, for the writer Katie Dippold (Parks And Recreation) and director Justin Simien (Dear White People) to let their imaginations run free, especially with an all-star cast, but there's a lack of ambition all round. The basic story sees mum Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son (Chase Dillon) move into a mansion that soon turns out to be haunted. Worse still, in a nod to the original theme park ride, if they try to leave the ghosts hitchhike with them, spooking everyone as they go. Confined to the house, they end up enlisting the help of grieving scientist (LaKeith Stanfield), a priest (Owen Wilson), a historian professor (Danny DeVito) and a medium (Tiffany Haddish) in order to put the spirits to rest.

This collection of stars is certainly hitting all the demographics, with DeVito a comedy icon in the Eighties with the likes of Twins and Ruthless People, Wilson hitting the late 90s, early noughties nostalgia button and Girls Trip star Haddish bringing the current generation with her. But the script has the creak of rusty armour as it tries to move between its caper elements and the more serious notes concerning grief. The ensemble cast only adds to the sense of the story lacking focus, as Dippold tries to serve up something for everyone. This means that while the chase scenes are effective, the jokes feel like the ghost of much better one-liners. There’s also a sense that Dippold was so concerned about slotting in the backstory that she almost forgot to have fun. Haddish channels the spirit of peak period Whoopi Goldberg and gets the best of the laughs and Jamie Lee Curtis has fun as disembodied medium Madame Leota but the others feel underserved.

A passable slice of summer entertainment thanks to the spirited verve of the cast but there's not a ghost of a chance you'll remember it by autumn.