Stream It Or Skip It: ‘IF’ on VOD, a Muddled Bummer of a Family Flick About Imaginary Friends And Bittersweet Yearning

From the boundless, and apparently bewildered, imagination of John Krasinski comes IF (now streaming on VOD services like Prime Video), all caps, because it’s an acronym for “imaginary friend.” The actor-turned-director follows up his two highly successful A Quiet Place movies with something of a drastically different tenor – a family-oriented dramedy about a sad 12-year-old girl who finds herself hanging out with a collection of CG-animated IFs, and also Ryan Reynolds, for somewhat baffling reasons. Perhaps you’re catching on that this movie is a bit puzzling, an oddment that struggled to find an audience in theaters (it’s gutted out $174 million worldwide), because it’s something that Krasinski apparently wanted to make for everyone – with voice cameos from every famous person he could drum up, it seems – but kinda ended up being for no one.

IF: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a megabummer montage: Memories of happy times between Bea (Cailey Fleming) and her mom (Catharine Daddario) and dad (Krasinski). Lots of make-believe and playtime and drawing and painting and building blanket forts and dancing to Tina Turner, and then – oh no – Mom is wearing a do-rag in the hospital. Some years go by. Bea is now 12, and back in the same apartment we saw in the montage, which, after we piece everything together, belongs to her grandmother (Fiona Shaw), who lives in Brooklyn and let them stay there while Bea’s mother was undergoing treatment. Except this time, Mom is gone and Dad is in the hospital, awaiting mystery surgery, and all this vagueness would make sense if Bea was, say, six or seven, and struggling to comprehend this ordeal, but she’s 12 and should be fully on board the Melancholy Deep Sigh Life Train by now, especially after the hard lessons that came with losing her mother. Bea visits Dad in the hospital and he’s all perky and upbeat because he’s trying not to worry his daughter. HEY NBD! is the implied message of everything he says and does, and what with all his goofing around, he acts like he could out-Patch Adams Patch Adams himself. Which is to say, we have to resist the urge to sock him one.

One night, Bea is watching Harvey with her grandmother, because that’s what people in movies about imaginary friends tend to do. Granny dozes off and Bea wanders off for a long time, which happens a lot – Grandma must be pretty liberal in her parenting – but if she didn’t, imagine how boring her life would be. Anyway, Bea ends up meeting a weird animation named Blossom (voice of Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a buglike being who looks lifted from an old b/w Disney cartoon. Blossom lives in a neighboring apartment with Blue (voice of Steve Carell), a giant fluffbomb who’s part-Purple Snorklewacker, part-Sully from Monsters Inc. They’re IFs – imaginary friends – who’ve been abandoned by the kids who dreamt them up. Or maybe “forgotten” is a better word? Either way, it’s depressing in the way that the Toy Story movies were depressing because they were all about how children grow up and replace the fun, silly things of youth for the less fun, serious things of adolescence and adulthood. 

Anyway, Blossom and Blue are sorta in the care of Cal (Reynolds), a gent in suspenders whose purpose isn’t quite clear, although we’re starting to get the distinct whiff of a third-act revelation here. Cal takes Bea to Coney Island, where there’s a secret retirement home for the lost, forgotten, abandoned, discarded, disappeared (are you crying yet?) IFs of the world. There’s a talking bear in a hat (Louis Gossett Jr), a unicorn (Emily Blunt), a gummy bear (Amy Schumer), an astronaut (George Clooney), a grinning sunflower (Matt Damon), a googly-eyed bubble (Awkwafina), a gob of slime (Keegan-Michael Key), a talking ice cube in a glass of water (Bradley Cooper) – I could go on, because this thing is like a game of Can You Recognize the Celebrity Voice. 

Bea feels sad about the plight of the IFs, some of whom discuss their abandonment issues in a totally hilarious group-therapy sequence. She takes it upon herself to try to pair them with new children, e.g., the super-precocious boy with a broken leg and arm and coccyx she meets in the hospital while visiting her dad. There are some rules to how this works, but eff if I know what they are; Precocious Boy can’t see the IFs, and others can’t see them either, especially adults, who are too damn grown-up to acknowledge anthropomorphic manifestations of whimsy. But she has to be careful not to be considered insane – there’s a shot of her hugging Blue, and all a bystander sees is Bea floating in the air. Meanwhile, Cal is annoyed about everything. What the hell is he doing here, anyway? Anyhow, consider the plot hereby established far too deep into the movie than it should be. Like, 45 minutes in, maybe more. It’s almost half the movie. What have we been doing the entire time? Well, we’ve been gutting it out, as the movie diddlefarts around. Urgent, it is not; antsy, you most certainly are.  

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The opening sequence is cribbed from Up. The concept has the vibe of Dad Krasinski trying to make a movie for his kids, sort of like Robert Rodriguez did with Sharkboy and Lavagirl (which was far less watchable than this). The film seems to want to be in the vein of animation-meets-live-action masterpiece Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but a heck of a lot less fun. And the Toy Storys did all of this so much more effectively.

Performance Worth Watching: Fleming is a winning presence in this movie, despite not knowing quite what to do with this tonally and conceptually discombobulated material. 

Memorable Dialogue: SAD TROMBONE: “You don’t have to treat me like a kid,” Bea tells her dad. “Life doesn’t always have to be fun.” 

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Krasinski clearly wants us to feel things: longing, regret, nostalgia, melancholy, wistfulness, whimsy – all the stuff ingrained in the all-too-adult sense that the carefree joys of childhood are fleeting, that innocence inevitably always evaporates into the ether, to be grasped at yearningly but never fully embraced again. Are you bummed out yet? You should be. This is a maudlin-ass movie couched in the trappings of a cute kiddie flick. What was I feeling throughout the movie? Weird. I just felt weird. Like, this-movie-is-trying-hard-but-just-doesn’t-work weird.  

Which isn’t to say the core idea lacks potential – for grown folks, imaginary friends are symbols of the childlike purity we no longer have, yet yearn for in bittersweet reminiscences. But the idea falters mightily in the context of a pseudo-clever fairy tale being pitched at the whole fam damily (read: the audience that Pixar bullseyes so well). Krasinski aims for timelessness (IF is apparently set in the ’90s, pre-smartphone, because that thing ruined everything), and winkingly drops in Harvey and Calvin and Hobbes references, hoping to draft on some pop-cultural touchstones. But the pacing is draggy, the performances are more curious than engaging (Reynolds and Fleming occasionally seem lost), the lack of specificity lowers the stakes (what’s Bea’s dad’s ailment, anyway?) and by the final stretch, Krasinski YANKS on our cockles without properly warming them first, which makes one feel angry and manipulated. IF ultimately illustrates how Krasinski has some filmmaking acumen and good, original ideas, but doesn’t know enough about cockles yet to attempt to stoke them. Be gentle with the cockles, bro. They’re delicate. 

Our Call: I wish I could make an “IF actually stands for It’s Fine” joke, but I can’t, because it’s not. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.