IF (2024)
a review by Evan Landon
I think Hollywood is still trying to figure out what to do with Ryan Reynolds. Don't get me wrong; I am a huge fan of the actor, but after they tried him out in rom coms and bewildering dramatic roles (Women In Gold, I'm looking at you) it seemed as if they wanted to try him out as a superhero which ended up working out just fine. The little stutter steps of Blade:Trinity and Green Lantern are forgivable, but not a lot of actors make it back from two huge flops like that. Three, if you count X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but he was such a fan of Deadpool that he snagged it before anyone else could. I can't really blame him though because Deadpool has always been my faves since appearing in the Rob Liefeld's X-Force when I was a kid, but I digress.
I bring that up because I don't remember a whole lot of this film, even though I saw it in the theater, but because I keep thinking of scenes from Free Guy instead (it was a much better movie). While I can understand the desire for his kids to see his movies, I can't help in thinking that he has slipped into that watered down version of his schtick to sleepwalk through some very expensive roles. Again, I am not mad at him for that, or anything else really. It just may or may not already be an old trope for him that he can float along to for the rest of his career.
In this one, John Krasinski wrote, produced, and co-starred in this live-action/animation family comedy, so apparently that is his new thing now. The story seems a little contrived, as the script kind of goes in all sorts of directions after establishing young Cailey Fleming as his daughter dealing with the loss of her mother and his upcoming heart surgery. Reynolds plays her neighbor who shows her all of the imaginary friends (IFs) that only certain people can see (played by a cornucopia of celebrity voiceovers). As he is wore out and apathetic at his age after decades of helping find them real life friends, who discarded them once they got older, his plan is to hand the reigns over and her to serve as his apprentice while she deals with the dark sadness looming over her own life. You can kind of see where this is going.
As far as the animation to live-action effects are concerned, it is done well enough to where sometimes you don't even notice it and the characters interact with the live actors seamlessly enough. That is definitely a plus.
I was worried that I was taking my 8 year-old niece to the theater to watch the Blumhouse horror movie Imaginary that came out a few months earlier, but that one wasn't scary anyways, so that's just whatever. That being said, this one felt like a mix of Fantastic Beasts and Big Fish not only in tone, but overall nuances and lessons learned which are perfectly fine and somewhat important for a certain niche of younger viewers who may or may not be going through something similar.
It may be a little early to gauge how this one fared in the box office, but it should be in its last weekend in theaters, so it might be able to call it at $173.6 million against a bloated $110 million budget allowing for Paramount and both Reynolds and Krasinski's production companies to almost break even. It is definitely re-watchable, but you did not miss anything by skipping it in its theater run.
Anyways, you should 100% watch this instead of the Blumhouse one I almost watched a second time. Maybe I will do that one somewhere down the road, as well, or maybe not because that movie kind of sucked. Oh well.
3 out of 5