Goosebumps (2015)

Goosebumps arrives with a premise that could sustain a lecture and declines, politely, to deliver one. A fictionalized R.L. Stine (Jack Black, committing) guards the monsters he wrote into existence, and when a ventriloquist's dummy named Slappy sets them loose on a small Delaware town, the film has every opportunity to editorialize about creation, responsibility, or the moral obligations of the storyteller. It does not. It stages a yeti at an ice rink and moves on. The result is a brisk, agreeable romp that treats its own cleverness as a delivery system for slapstick, not a pulpit.

The film's social awareness is limited to the ambient kind that arrives without anyone asking. Karan Soni and Keith Arthur Bolden appear as a teacher and a principal, do their jobs, and exit, with no comment made about either. Odeya Rush's Hannah is the girl next door, and when she turns out to be a ghost from one of Stine's manuscripts, the revelation is a plot mechanism, not a statement about anything. The adult women fare no better or worse: Amy Ryan's Gale is a widow with a new job, Jillian Bell's Lorraine is a single sister waiting to be paired off, and the screenplay views both as scenery. There is no framework here, feminist or otherwise, because there is no framework at all.

What remains is craft. The monsters are faithfully rendered, Danny Elfman's score does its job, and the whole enterprise runs on the pleasant engine of a studio that knows its audience and respects their bedtime. No lessons are imparted, no consciousness is raised, no fourth wall is broken to scold the viewer. Even the meta conceit, a film about the dangers of imagination, resists the temptation to mean something. The typewriter clacks on in the final shot, promising more monsters, and nothing else.