IF (2024) is directed by John Krasinski and stars Cailey Fleming, Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Steve Carell, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fiona Shaw, Louis Gossett Jr., Alan Kim, Liza Colon-Zayas, and Bobby Moynihan. The film follows Bea (Fleming), a young girl dealing with her father’s (Krasinski) deteriorating health who’s forced to go and live with her grandmother (Shaw). While there, she meets her grandma’s mysterious upstairs neighbor, Cal (Reynolds), who, like herself, has the ability to see the imaginary friends left behind by adults who’ve outgrown them. Together, the two set out to find new homes for these imaginary friends so they can make the world a better place. 

Reynolds is well-cast and Fleming is a likable young lead, the script just never really allows them to stretch their legs as performers. That being said, Fleming’s relationship with her ailing father played by John Krasinski is the film’s emotional core. The story is forgettable in most ways, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me tear up at least once or twice. 

The biggest disappointment for me is that the casting of the various voice actors feels a tad lazy. On top of this, the characters they’re forced to voice are awkwardly designed and look like uninspired versions of classic Disney characters. They’re also just all so suffocatingly friendly to the point where they feel like caricatures. I’m aware that these are supposed to be goofy imaginary friends, but they should feel like individual characters as well. Oftentimes, the script feels like it’s more interested in creatively pointless asides as opposed to building its story/characters. These sequences of cute visuals would be fun if they actually supported the story, but instead, they feel like nothing more than soulless attempts to show off the mediocre CGI/character designs. 

Besides maybe the central premise, the movie offers little that hasn’t been seen before. It’s a family film whose themes range from the struggle to find a home to the importance of accepting one’s inner child. Although it’s occasionally effective in an emotional sense, it’s also gratingly manipulative and sentimental. The continuous use of cheesy platitudes relating to life feels surface-level at best and results in a film that feels like its messages can be useful to children, but frustratingly unoriginal to everyone else.

The movie is also so focused on being heart-warming and positive that it forgets about implementing any sort of conflict. Characters aren’t often forced to overcome meaningful struggles and therefore feel stagnant. Individual scenes fail to form a cohesive theme/arc which causes the experience to feel disjointed and rambling. 

It’s a film that’s not zany enough to appeal to kids and not intellectual enough to appeal to adults. It makes the biggest mistake a “family film” can and tries to appeal equally to children and adults, therefore appealing to neither. It reuses the same jokes multiple times and surprisingly lacks a lot of whimsy for a film so intent on shoving it down the audience’s throat. After Krasinski’s wonderful work on the first two A Quiet Place films, it’s clear that he’s struggling to find his voice as a director outside of the horror genre.

Overall, this is a perfectly serviceable film for younger audiences but won’t do much to appeal to anyone else. It features a premise that any child can connect to, but besides that fails to offer much new to the genre. This feels like the work of a man who says kids love him, but as soon as he’s around kids, they clearly think he’s boring. It’s mostly a competently made movie, I just struggle to understand who it’s for. C