If you were fortunate enough to get an invitation for the preview of John Krasinski’s latest movie, “IF,” held on November 30, 2021, you might have been treated to an opening remark where the writer and director of the film issued a special note claiming that this movie is dedicated to all the “girl dads” out there. The thing is I have seen it after it came out, and indeed, that’s true: “IF” family-friendly it surely is, but it’s not made for kids–it is made for their dads. The girl dads, who wish their children something in ‘if you give a mouse a pancake’ range and above and don’t want them to be terrified. On that note, I don’t really think it is possible. It would be astonishing.
This is quite the change for Krasinski who has moved from a leading comic on a sitcom to directing the successful “A Quiet Place” films. However, when you look at the man himself, it kind of fits. After all, this is the guy who created a good news show from his home office during the pandemic and later sold it to ViacomCBS, presumably for quite a lot of money. This is the new all-American, smiling, parenting, and horror-tinkering superhero who wants to make a movie out of which his kids can watch and have fun.
Yes, the results are there, but they look like a vegetative live action version of a Pixar film, with surface elements, such as the Monsters Inc style structure of IF world, and the emotional tales of growing up embedded in the narrative like in Inside Out and Up. The title sequence also quotes “Up” introducing some knee slappers of domestic videos portraying Krasinski, as a father on a home cam, very staged and theatrical family moments. It wasn’t shot with an HD camera, but pretty low-grade quality film, which further increases the level of suspicion. When movies come up with this plot device, there’s only one thing that can come, bloodshed.
Twice over: By the time we meet Krasinski’s daughter, Bea (Cailey Fleming), grief is still in her heart because her mother died somewhere off-screen quite some time ago, and there is a more recent event where her father is also placed in a hospital and is recovering for heart surgery. (It was A Simple Favor: we never learn the details, just the fact that “broken heart” is not a great diagnosis. The film does not thrive on complexity.) She endures the trauma to a clear extent but despite Krasinski’s terrible efforts to put a smile on her face in the hospital, the trauma stays.
Bea has moved in with her equally bubbly grandma, played by Fiona Shaw (one of the best parts of the film) into her old rickety flat. It is there that she moves to a different floor and comes into contact with an imaginary IF-loving man who ends up being her grandmother’s neighbor, the jaded IF whisperer CALVIN (Ryan Reynolds). You see, he’s been helping me out, and I can’t believe I’ve been waiting for my mom to stop pretending for so long. Usually, once kids stop believing in imaginary friends, they end up in a sad pastel retirement home.
Wanting to help Calvin save IFs and ready to do literally anything, Bea decides to offer the IFs a productive viewpoint.
This is the loose framework which can be said to contain the script written by Krasinski that is surprisingly thin, in that it hints at some degree of worldbuilding and but not really making any great attempts to build a foundation and, rather, goes through multiple emotions one after the other. For a child s adventure film, it is actually rather blunt and pretty much whiny, trading in belly laughs for a subtle sense of sadness for the patient viewer. This might be appealing to the young dads who are present, but for children, it has got to be the most boring thing ever.
In the early stretches of IF, Krasinski’s suspenseful eye from ‘A Quiet Place’ was kind of funny and used for young-kids-horror effect: Kaminski shoots grandma’s apartment’s twisty staircase as if it was the Overlook Hotel, and one early spooky moment gives us children’s perspective on how odd it is when a strange old lady looks at you from the corridor. Some of these moments add an idiosyncratic touch to Guillermo del Toro’s more sugar-coated films, constructing a universe where creativity is as much a menace as it is a source of solace.
But then we get to the IFs, and all of their dilemmas, which is where most of rest of IF starts to lose its appeal.
The creatures themselves are hardly much to write home about: they take whatever form their kids conceived, from fire breathing snakes to walking talking and self-roasting marsh mellows, that are all voiced by a who’s who of “that guy” guest voices that will have you hurrying for your phone to look at IMDb a moment later. Sure, they’re impressive in their own right, but what they lack is excitement or any charm. That is particularly being aided by the fact that blue, a purplish, snaggle. That is particularly true for the film, IFblue, a purplish, snaggle-toothed furball that looks like the Grimace after having endured a couple of decades of British dentistry. The first thing to explain about Steve Carell is that he plays him as if for some Alfred E. Newman type gig without adding any type of arched eyebrows whatsoever. It’s rather embarrassing in some ways given that we’ve seen Carell in his recent roles flex his voice acting skills with aplomb playing outrageous animated characters like Gru in Despicable Me. The human cast does not give a much better performance, including Reynolds, who is present throughout the film with a complete disregard and the same tired Deadpool routine. Making use of Krasinski as the fun dad calvin is almost unnecessary since he serves as a fake for Krasinski in what he has always visualized himself; calvin however, is not the fun and cheerful side that helps the IFs on their mission.
And then, of course, there’s Fleming herself, the waifish girly who comes into her own during what are a handful of Big Moments near the end, otherwise she is effective as a sponge and a bottom lip cartoon.
The IFs terrible and prescriptive quasi mechanics also make the impossible somehow plausible and shift instantly depending on which of Krasinski’s loose heartstrings he wishes to tug at next. The script doesn’t seem to confirm a consistent theory regarding how they interact: Is their presence only momentary and does it get lost out of sight, or do they get locked up in a palace? Is the strategy to rehome them to new children or persuade their new adult guardians to believe in them? What’s the strategy from there as well? All these are inconsequential questions about the presumed kiddie audience, but it is this very low level of stunted expectation that comes with such incompetently constructed mechanics that gets one engrossed in the mechanics of the whole thing making the entire product as is bland and devoid of any humor. By the end one gets the specific impression that all this sturm und drang is for stakes that, all things consider, are very low indeed.
Krasinski is able to occasionally deliver moments of good ideas or even scenes: An imaginative and busy IF chase sequence wherein a geriatric home is brought to life according to the creative impulses of the now resident Bea (with images of Burke-Berkley and Reynolds abstractly emerging from an oil canvas); A scene when Shaw’s heroine is hiding IF and Ballerina with former IF (Phoebe Waller–Bridge) pays teasing but rather unseen visits.
But for each one we get another boring scenewith tired performers saying basic things of the story, or fighting bland clichés like the ones says “The most important stories we tell, are the ones we tell ourselves.” Not even mentioning the film’s songs, turning to the last one, which is so blatant, arguably so bad, that Wes Anderson deserves an award for composing this.
“IF” is a pretty respectable failure. Kids movie but funny and parents’ movie but senseless. I hope Krasinski enjoyed himself filming it. It looked enough of a soothing experience for after the pressures of doing two horror movies. But enough of that, we are now grown ups and need to grow up.
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