Blue & Company review: have we become too old? 🫧

After the saga Without a Sound, John Krasinski tries his hand at tender and family chronicle at Paramount Pictures. The actor and director lamented not having any film to show to his children – who will not have the right to see the horrific duology until they turn 40 – he decided to draw inspiration from their imagination to tell the story of the meeting between a little girl and imaginary friends on the decline. Blue & Company intends to take advantage of spring and a lull in dark rooms to bring together young and old around a enchanting tale and enchanted. But will the magic work?

Years after a hasty move, Bea is forced to return to New York for several days. She is back in the apartment where she grew up and spends a few days with her grandmother. But one night she crosses the road strange characters. She quickly discovers that she is the chosen one, the only human able to see imaginary friends of other children. Then begins a quest that will allow him to help these magical creatures reconnect with their owners.

Growing up too fast

From the introduction, John Krasinski sets the scene for a children's comedy which will not spare its spectators. Through a flashback sequence, rather well executed, the director introduces the notion which will be at the epicenter of his story: mourning. While more and more children's films prefer to avoid angry subjects, Krasinski takes them brilliantly to build his touching protagonist. Bea, at the age of ten, is not a child like any other.

Marked by the absence of a mother, she is more mature than his contemporaries. A melancholy hovers over this introduction, which will gradually tend towards more childish and regressive comedy. Because the objective for the story is less to recount the discovery of this world of wonders than to return to childhood for the character played by Cailey Fleming. It is his wonder that will be the driving force, as much as his collaboration with Ryan Reynolds' character.

Revealed by the series The Walking Dead, in which she plays Judith Grimes, the young actress takes on the character of a discreet pre-teen. In front of her, the interpreter of Deadpool appears more restrained than usual, even if he does not part with his energy and his talent for facial expressions. Steve Carell and Phoebe Waller-Bridge are also invited to complete the lead quartet, the two actors lend their voices to certain imaginary friends abandoned by their creators. Without surprise, Carell catches the light and steals the show from the rest of its peers.

If the meeting of these talents should have sparked, Blue & Company suffers from a blatant lack of enthusiasm. Pleasant when it ventures towards drama or melancholy, the film struggles to bring out its comedic moments. The fault of one too conventional scenario, which can no longer take advantage of the surprise effect of its opening to work miracles. This lukewarmness is not solely the responsibility of the story, the faults are shared with a visual copy too much restraint.

And if…

Blue & Companyfrom its original title “If”, is an invitation to travel. The film is nourished by the crazy ideas of children, always quick to invent colorful characters to keep them company. What cruelly undermines this artistic proposition is precisely the inventiveness. If the director has nothing to be ashamed of for his staging, sanitized aesthetics of the copy is not the most exciting.

The animated characters lack madness, content to be unimaginative heroes… A shame for a film whose title is original “imaginary friend”. A banana with exhibitionist tendencies, a bubble prone to stress or a burnt marshmallow, we expected better from this film inspired by the daughters of the director and screenwriter. If the visual effects are convincing, they rarely manage to free themselves from the children's tale in any respect.

If the youngest will get caught up in the game, helped by the good nature of Ryan Reynolds and the sympathy for the main character, the adults may regret that Blue & Company has not quite embraced his regressive ambition. It's a shame, because the idea can recall a number of animated films evolving around a hidden world like Monster & Co. And Toy Story to recite nobody else but them. Unlike Pixar's offerings, the latest addition to the Paramount catalog skimps on good ideas and never really manages to bring its fantasy and fantastic universe to fruition.

Even the retirement home of imaginary friends lack of panache. One could hope that weirdness would be at the heart of the process. Yes, original title of the film, thus recalls everything that the artistic proposition could have been, a world of all possibilities, reduced to a pure product of entertainment calibrated for (and only for) very young spectators. At the end of the session, we applaud the dramatic side of Blue & Company, we salute the performance of Steve Carrell in the skin of the adorable Blue, but we deplore that the cursor was not pushed further. John Krasinski gave horror a second wind with his Without a Soundit's hard to imagine that its first foray into the children's department would benefit from the same aura in the cinema.