CANDYMAN (2021) *

Rebooting Candyman made sense from a financial standpoint.  So many horror franchises are getting legacy sequels nowadays, so it seemed like a good idea to resurrect Candyman for modern-day audiences.  The fact that Jordan (Get Out) Peele co-wrote and produced the flick certainly gave hope that this just wasn’t going to be another by-the-numbers cash grab.  As it turns out, this Candyman is a muddled, messy, and often dull slog. 

Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is an artist who is struggling to live up to his early potential.  He finds inspiration in the urban legend of the Candyman, and when he incorporates elements of the Candyman legend into his work, people around him begin to die.  Eventually, he finds himself slowly transforming into the titular hook-handed boogeyman. 

This seems like it started out as a radical reimagining of the character, but somewhere along the way, someone got cold feet and tried to play Connect the Dots to tie it all back to the original.  The fact that half the movie revolves around a different Candyman (a wrongly murdered man in the ‘70s) seems to suggest that.  The idea that the hero is slowly (with the emphasis on SLOWLY) changing into the killer is interesting, but it never really works.  Besides, the only halfway effective moment in his transformation was blatantly stolen from Cronenberg’s The Fly.

The kills are weak too.  Many of them feel shoehorned in there (like the high school bathroom massacre) just to up the body count as they have little connection to the overall story.  The film is particularly shaky whenever it tries to introduce social topics into the mix.  Issues like police brutality, gentrification, and the exploitation of African American artists are given broad, clumsy strokes, but these ideas are all kernels that never really pop.  

The Candyman movies were never very good to begin with, but this one has the dubious distinction of being the worst of the bunch.  The ending especially is frustrating, mostly because when the REAL Candyman shows up, it’s only for like five fucking seconds.  And speaking of the real Candyman, did they not have the budget to use flashbacks from the other movies?  Instead, we get a bunch of crappy looking shadow puppets that fill in the story gaps from the original to the reboot.  This crap might’ve been okay for a title sequence or something, but by about the fourth time the paper cutouts were trotted out, I found my patience sorely tested.

 In short, there ain’t nothing sweet about this Candyman.