Ghoulish road trip

In Addams Family 2, America’s spookiest family goes on a cross-country road trip, but it turns out everyone should have stayed home—including the audience. The film, rated PG, boasts a host of talented voice actors, but they’re wasting their time on this half-baked, unfunny story that’s a tangled mess of clichés about family and belonging and finding oneself.

Gomez Addams (Oscar Isaac) and his wife Morticia (Charlize Theron) decide to load their family into a giant hearse of an RV for a vacation. They think they need to get away with the kids because the parents have struggled to connect with their daughter Wednesday who feels some teenage alienation. An unscrupulous scientist named Cyrus Strange (Bill Hader) exacerbates those feelings, claiming there was a mix-up at birth and Wednesday is his long-lost daughter rather than a true Addams.

These two storylines don’t mesh well, but don’t let that bother you while the Addamses wind their way across the country. The movie has plenty of other things to bother you. Wednesday’s attempts to kill her brother Pugsley are supposed to be funny, but they’re not. Pugsley’s inept attempts to pick up girls are supposed to be funny, but they’re not. The filmmakers’ mockery of Texans is supposed to be funny, but—you get the idea.