Film reviews: Haunted Mansion, Sympathy for the Devil, Talk to Me 

• Walt Disney Pictures
• Haunted Mansion

Haunted Mansion
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl looks more and more like a unicorn with every other attempt to reverse-engineer theme-park ideas into movies. This second stab at a Haunted Mansion feature—following, but not in any way related to, the 2003 Eddie Murphy comedy—follows a grieving New Orleans-based physicist named Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) who helps a single mom (Rosario Dawson) and her 9-year-old son (Chase W. Dillon) deal with the spooks inhabiting their creepy new house. They're joined in their efforts by a priest (Owen Wilson), a spiritualist (Tiffany Haddish) and a local historian (Danny DeVito), and the cast helps provide some laughs. But while director Justin Simien's 2000 feature Bad Hair showed his facility for mixing horror with humor, that mix just doesn't quite work here, especially with Katie Dippold's script also trying to wrangle genuine human emotion out of the characters' reaction to loss. And all of that is on top of the obligatory (even if often creative) nods to the Disneyland attraction, including Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis), The Hatbox Ghost (Jared Leto), the stretching room, etc. The Haunted Mansion ride itself went through years of re-imagining to find the right balance between spooky and fun, between a full-fledged narrative and a collection of individually appealing elements. This movie shows just how hard it is to catch that lighting in a bottle, or a head in a crystal ball. Available July 28 in theaters. (PG-13)

• RLJE Films
• Sympathy for the Devil

Sympathy for the Devil
Sometimes you just have to admit to yourself, "It doesn't entirely matter that this movie isn't particularly good, because it's giving me Nicolas Cage at his quintessentially Nicolas Cage-iest." This mostly-two-hander thriller casts Joel Kinnaman as David Chamberlain, who is on his way to a Las Vegas hospital where his wife is giving birth when he's carjacked by an unnamed man (Cage). And it soon becomes clear that—at least as far as Cage's character is concerned—his choice of targets was far from random. What follows from a plot standpoint is fairly familiar, including the various ways David tries to get help from his predicament, like instigating a roadside police stop. But the bottom line is that from the moment Cage appears on screen, in a cardinal-red jacket with hair dyed to match, it's clear that director Yuval Adler was most likely giving him exactly one direction: "You do you, Nic." Thus we get Cage strutting in a diner to the jukebox playing Alicia Bridges' "I Love the Nightlife," or laying into a story about childhood visits from the Mucus Man where even Kinnaman's reaction takes suggest "what in the actual fuck is happening right now." The gunfire and head-butting and Molotov cocktails amp up the gritty vibe, but nothing is more engrossing than the turned-to-11 dynamics of Peak Cage. Available July 28 in theaters. (NR)

• A24 Films
• Talk to Me

Talk to Me
Creating a clear, understandable set of "rules" may not be the most important thing when you're fashioning a supernatural horror story, but you can certainly feel the loss of impact when those rules aren't clear. Australian filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Philippou introduce us to Mia (Sophie Wilde), one of a group of teenage friends who become fascinated with an embalmed hand that appears to have the ability to invite the spirits of dead souls into a host—with, not surprisingly, potentially terrible consequences. The early scenes are perhaps the most effective, emphasizing the flippancy with which these kids treat their occult dabblings, right up until the point where things go dreadfully wrong. It's also clear that the Philippous want to connect their premise with—say it all together with me now, horror fans—trauma, more specifically Mia's ongoing grief over the loss of her mother, possibly to suicide. The problem with Talk to Me as the creepy scenes unfold is that, rather than revealing more about the nature of these possessions, the film actually gets murkier about them. What exactly are these spirits trying to accomplish? Are they deliberately deceiving Mia in the messages they deliver to her, and if so, to what end? There are some fun, unsettling scares throughout the running time, but the notion that it's heading towards some particular payoff from a character standpoint remains much harder to grab on to than that embalmed hand. Available July 28 in theaters. (R)