The Addams Family (2019)

Universal Pictures’ modestly grim and surprisingly sweet reboot of The Addams Family stands out across a slew of family-friendly movies like a goth student in a school class photo.

The film's main problem lies in the script's failure to come up with a plot to keep this high-powered group worth watching once you've taken in the decor. While the animation outdoes the animated TV series produced by Hanna-Barbera in the 1970s and 1990s, it's not clever enough to persuade you that you haven't seen it all before.

Throw in a fantastic vocal cast that includes Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloe Grace Moretz, Allison Janney, Bette Midler and, hilariously, Snoop Dogg as the hirsute cousin It, and the result is a terrific way to temporarily escape festive season madness.

If it ultimately feels a bit thin - more stylish pastiche than full-blooded reanimation - it should still distract your little terrors for an hour and a half.

This uncreepy and decidedly unkooky film is a letdown.

Its celebration of misunderstood outsiderdom is too generic to amount to much more than a bargain-basement 'Despicable Me'.

The appeal of this "Addams Family," which doesn't break the mold, is simply to spend some more time in this gently spooky world, a gateway for budding creepsters and goths.

Matt Lieberman's nearly laugh-free script prefers to rehash Charles Addams' old one-liners or offer terrible updates.

"The Addams Family" has a rote plot built out of bits and pieces from a lot of other animated films that had nothing to do with lumbering eight-foot-tall butlers or posh mistresses of the house who look like spindly vampiric cadavers.

If this installment lays on the moral (all families are freaky in their own ways) a bit thick, it has just enough wit and weirdness to honour its source material.