If (#557)


I like and admire John Krasinski as a comedian (The Office), an actor and more recently as a writer/director of The Quiet Place. He appears to be a nice and talented man.  But I'm not quite sure what he was trying to do with the film I saw yesterday—IF.  Did he make this part live actors, part animated creature movie for children or for adults or did he hope to appeal to both?  Based on my experience in the theater yesterday, he missed the boat.  The only other people in the theater with me were a father and his young son, and they talked continually and loudly throughout the movie which suggests that neither was interested in what was going on on the screen.  I would describe If as a fantasy, a light-hearted, colorful film inhabited by a star-studded cast of actors (Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Sam Rockwell, and Maya Rudolph, among others) and some very cute computer-generated lovable beings who were the real stars of the movie.  I think most of the actors did voice-overs of the creatures.  The movie depicts a young, extremely talented young girl who accompanies her father to the hospital for some undisclosed reason and is temporarily living with her kindly grandmother.  She somehow encounters Ryan Reynolds and becomes aware of her power to unite adults with the fantasy playmates/companions of their youth.  She and Reynolds encounter all kinds of adventures in their romp through the big city which I identified as New York City eliciting deep emotional responses from the audience at times.  I honestly don't know what I thought of the movie, and I seriously doubt it is going to be a critical or box office success,  Less than half the critics (47%) gave it as thumbs up, while 87% of audiences liked it, although I suspect they really didn't understand what was going on. 

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