Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of IF. This movie follows a young girl who discovers that she can see everyone’s imaginary friends, or IF’s, and sets out on a journey to reunite the forgotten IFs with their kids. I think this is gonna be one of the cuter movies of the year, but besides that there isn’t too much substance with this. Cailey Fleming is really good in this lead role and is easily the highlight of the entire movie. However, besides Fiona Shaw in certain moments as the grandmother, and Ryan Reynolds as Cal, there aren’t any living characters that are actually intriguing. There are so many IFs and it’s impossible to keep track with all of the big-name actors and actresses who do the voices. However, once again, there’s only one IF that has a lot of time to evolve as a character, and that’s Blue voiced by Steve Carell. A lot of the plot is also rushed because of how long it takes to get going, especially since it’s only a 2-hour movie.
This is usually where I would talk about the villain, but again this is a cute kid’s movie so there isn’t one. However, I do want to talk about the acting displayed by Cailey, especially towards the end. There’s one specific 10-minute stretch, in her house and in the hospital with her dad, where she absolutely kills it. Easily the best part of the entire movie, and that alone made the movie feel like it was worth watching. The cinematography is also a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Whenever the IFs and the human characters were together, it didn’t look out of place at all. In the middle, there’s also some really cool looking scenes with Ryan Reynolds’ character. I think the score was also good with the song choice, but I don’t know if it was just the theater I was in, but the music itself seemed to be way too loud at times and put in weird spots.
I always rate movies and I rate them based on 10 things in the movie. Those things are: emotion, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, main character, and dialogue. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this movie a 67/100, and again I don’t think it’s a bad movie at all, however there is just a lot of mediocrity and even when there’s some really good moments, it usually got brought back down a bit with something that wasn’t overly needed.
