John Krasinski’s IF is something of an imaginary creature in today’s cinema landscape. Paramount’s aspirant blockbuster is a full-on big budget children’s film with no attachment to established intellectual property. Compare this to essentially every other family offering coming up this summer: Despicable Me 4, The Garfield Movie, Inside Out 2, Harold and the Purple Crayon. The big purple elephant in the room is the weird imaginary friend movie that is a big studio risk in desperate search for an audience. This audience, one imagines, is families. The kids come for the colorful creatures that are wholly unrecognizable to them, and the parents stay for…potentially life threatening heart surgery?

The shame is that the diverse array of computer-generated imaginary things (they prefer to be called “ifs” for whatever reason) are mostly great visual effects, and they also are occasionally characters with personality. The potential for this to be an original story that sparks imaginations young and old alike is unfortunately squandered by tones of saccharinity and blinding sentimentality. The film’s earnestness may have been an asset, if the story it brings the full force of its heart to wasn’t muddy and emotionally manipulative.

In the world of IF, imaginary friends disappear once their creators forget them. I mean, kind of. They don’t “disappear” so much as they are forced into retirement home living in a complex hidden underneath Coney Island. Most people cannot see ifs, except some can. This is not explained. One of these lucky few is Bea (Cailey Fleming). Bea is a 12-year-old who is ready to grow up. With her mother passed away and her father in the hospital prepping for an undefined heart surgery, Bea stays with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) in Brooklyn for the summer.

As her grandmother falls asleep in front of the television each night, Bea wanders New York and stumbles upon the odd sight of an if, Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), and a man, Cal (Ryan Reynolds), breaking into a home. They are recovering the large, goofy purple bear-like creature Blue (Steve Carrell) from a failed attempt at assimilating the orphaned if into a new child’s life.

This is Cal’s undertaking: take the ifs that children forgot and try and find them new homes. It is another insufficiently explained yet crucial aspect of the film. How is it that a child can be given an if, if the ifs can only be seen be people who believe in them in the first place? Would those children not just make their own ifs? Later in the film, one child cannot see any of the ifs that are presented to him as potential friend adoptions. But it also proves to be incredibly easy for the original owners of the ifs to see those ifs in adulthood.

The film doesn’t want to stop and dwell on these things. If it was a more imaginative film, perhaps it would be fine leaving all of these confusing bits on the table. Instead, most of the film involves Bea and others sneaking around New York, criss-crossing around but not really going anywhere. When it doesn’t do this, it showcases the various ifs, most of whom are uninteresting personalities voiced by A- and B-listers you may or may not bother to recognize.

All of this is in service of over-cooked emotional appeals regarding rediscovering and embracing the inner child in us. The presentation is similarly dialed up to 11. Janusz Kaminski’s camerawork is sickly warm and filled with sun-soaked lens flares. Michael Giacchino’s score is heavy and overbearing. Then there is Reynolds’ performance, which is characterized by largely unmotivated and rapid shifts between curmudgeonly disdain for his work and highly emotive reaction shots that are the thing of melodrama.

IF is so concerned with making you feel (anything at all, but mostly melancholy and sad) that it forgets to be fun. The few moments that are dedicated to being joyful and full of life, including a big dance number at the film’s midpoint, are at such a disconnect from the maudlin attempts to pull at the heartstrings that the whole thing feels off-putting.

IF: D+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)