A young girl who goes through a difficult experience begins to see everyone’s imaginary friends who have been left behind as their real-life friends have grown up.

‘If’ is a new children’s fantasy movie from John Krasinki, departing from his previous work on the horror ‘A Quiet Place’ to a movie that is a hybrid of live action and animation with a focus very much on appealing to children. It is an attempt to create a movie that has the look and feel of an early 1990s children’s movie, with an aim of being sweet and wholesome and something for the whole family to enjoy. Sadly, I didn’t think it really succeeded in its aims and I found it to be overly sentimental, contrived and messily constructed, and while its heart is undoubtedly in the right place, that isn’t enough.

The ‘If’ of the title is really an acronym for Imaginary Friends, and that forms the basis of the premise. The premise follows a 12-year-old girl called Bea (Cailey Fleming) who has moved in temporarily with her grandmother in New York as her dad is awaiting heart surgery in a nearby hospital (sad backstory detail #1) – the same hospital where her mother died a few years earlier (sad backstory #2). When Bea encounters a strange creature near the apartment one night, she decides to follow it and ends up meeting her neighbour Cal (Ryan Reynolds), who explains to her that he is working with a group of imaginary friends (or ‘Ifs’) to place them with new children after their previous ‘owners’ had grown up. Thus begins a movie that is on one hand a bit of a comedy caper, and on the other hand a sentimental and nostalgic look at outgrowing your childhood and past memories. It never really makes sense, even in a fantasy movie logic kind of way, and the shonky world building makes it difficult to buy into the narrative.

For me, it didn’t really work as effectively as intended and I felt it was a lot weaker than other movies of recent times that have evoked the power of nostalgia more effectively (let’s see how ‘Inside Out 2’ does here). It is also very, very predictable, and while I’ll add the caveat that this is a children’s movie, I’m generally pretty terrible for spotting things and even I knew what was happening from the outset. It has a litany of well-known actors and actresses as the voices of the imaginary friends, which is fun I guess, but nothing we haven’t seen before in better animations (i.e. Pixar’s best), and overall I came away with the feeling that ‘If’ is a misfire, a well-intended misfire, but a misfire nonetheless.

Rating: 2/5

Directed By: John Krasinski

Starring: Cailey Fleming, Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Steve Carell, Fiona Shaw, Alan Kim and Louis Gossett Jr.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt11152168/