‘IF’ review: John Krasinski’s flight of fancy doesn’t quite take off

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John Krasinski seems like one of the nicest guys on the entire planet, so it’s with some regret that I report his new movie “IF” is largely a bust – a family film in search of an audience that it never convincingly finds.

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The idea is a decent one, if nicked from a couple of decades of Pixar movies. What if children’s imaginary friends – their I.F.s, get it? – hung around Earth in a mildly depressive state once their kids grew up into adulthood? Where would they go? In the most felicitous invention in writer-director Krasinski’s screenplay, they’d move to a retirement home a few stories beneath Coney Island, a run-down assisted-living facility for abandoned fantasy pals of all shapes and sizes. (Can imaginary friends apply for Medicare? Discuss.)

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Character designers Gary Dunn, Daniel Fernandez Casas and Ovi Nedelcu come up with a wild variety of IFs, and that’s indicative of the film’s problems. Would a child really have a soap bubble for an imaginary friend? A sentient ice cube? A glob of green slime? A flaming marshmallow? That these creatures are respectively voiced by Awkwafina, Bradley Cooper, Keegan-Michael Key and Krasinski himself does nothing to make the concept any less odd, but it does prove that the director has a lot of A-list friends. (Other vocal cameos come from Matt Damon, Maya Rudolph, Amy Schumer, George Clooney, Jon Stewart, Emily Blunt – a.k.a. Mrs. Krasinski – and the late Louis Gossett Jr., to whom the movie is dedicated.)

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The live-action humans in “IF” fare better, as do the two main CGI critters. The movie has been conceived as the emotional journey of Bea (Cailey Fleming), a 12-year-old girl who lost her mother (a briefly seen Catharine Daddario) to cancer in childhood and is now staying with her free-spirited grandmother (Fiona Shaw) in Brooklyn while her dad (Krasinski) undergoes vague but life-threatening surgery across the bridge in Manhattan. In an apartment upstairs from Grandma live two IFs – Blossom, a sprightly, saucer-eyed ballerina bug voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and a giant purple fur ball named Blue (Steve Carell) – along with their human handler, the stressed-out former clown Cal (Ryan Reynolds, also credited as a producer). Bea’s mission, should she decide to accept it, is to reunite IFs with their now-grown humans and rekindle the latter’s sense of wonder and security.

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One scene in which she does so – it involves Bobby Moynihan (“Saturday Night Live”) visibly coming apart at the seams – is very touching, and Fleming is fabulous in a tricky part, having to bloom from a self-protective shell of pre-adolescent seriousness to renewed joy and purpose. The actress has the knack of being intensely present in her scenes, which ironically makes the subtext of “IF” more compelling than the text.

Why is that a problem? Here’s one way to think about it: Every successful kids’ movie of the last 20 years – heck, every movie, period – has an internal logic that makes its world hold together no matter how far-out the concept is. Think (again) of Pixar: We never once question the fantastical premises of “Toy Story,” “Monsters Inc.,” “Wall-E,” “Up” or “Inside Out” because the rules are made clear through clever writing and rock-solid story structure. (A movie about the emotions inside a preteen’s brain? Really?)

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Because there’s little internal logic in “IF,” you may find yourself constantly asking why the characters are doing what they do, or how the whole imaginary-friend thing works within the context of the movie. Even if you don’t ask, your kids probably will on the drive home from the theater, and good luck coming up with answers.

It’s never clear whom this movie is for. The youngest children at the screening I attended ran around the theater out of boredom – presumably not finding enough funny stuff with Blossom and Blue – and while older kids will respond to Bea’s emotional journey, the scattershot storyline may keep them from fully engaging. Parents might reasonably look at Reynolds’s character, a grown man who doesn’t seem to have a job and who hangs out all day with a 12-year-old girl, and wonder what that’s about.

There’s a solution to that mystery, and while it packs an affecting punch, it comes awfully late in the game to dispel the movie’s air of earnest, unsettling disorganization. Wouldn’t it be great if movies made by nice guys weren’t just nice but good? If only.

RATING: ** OUT OF FOUR

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