IF (PG)
IMDb; Paramount; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Fandango; Paramount+

This movie apparently got mixed reactions from critics. So mixed that at the time I'm writing this, it has a 50% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Yep, doesn't get more mixed than that. Personally, I liked it. I do feel like it's a bit too derivative of the animated TV series Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Heck, this movie even has an imginary friend named Blue (and one of the main imginary friends on the show was named Bloo). Still, I thought the movie was fairly fun and amusing, as well as tugging at the heartstrings. I didn't think it was a great movie, but I do think it deserves to be a bit more highly regarded than it is. Oh, I also want to say that before I watched the movie, I wasn't sure if the title should be pronounced like the word "if" or the letters I-F. Now I think it's the former, because imginary friends are referred to as "ifs", though it might be more appropriate to capitalize that word, as "IFs".

We start out with some home video recordings of a young girl named Bea (short for Elizabeth) playing with her mother and father (John Krasinski, who also directed the film). It seems like they had a lot of fun together, until Bea's mother got sick and eventually died. I'm not sure how many years pass between the opening and the main part of the film, but it couldn't be many, because for most of the film Bea is just twelve years old (but doesn't want to be treated like a kid). Her father is now in the hospital, apparently for heart surgery. While he's there, Bea moves in with her grandmother, but visits her father often. One night, Bea is out walking, when she sees something strange. At first she apparently thinks it's just a young girl, though it's pretty obviously not a human, I'd say. She follows it into her grandmother's apartment building, and up the stairs to another apartment. A voice from inside tells her to go away. Which she does, but it's not long before she discovers what she saw was actually an IF named Blossom. (A sort of anthropomorphic butterfly girl, who is in black & white and looks like an old-timey cartoon.) But first she meets a much larger, furry, purple IF named Blue (voiced by Steve Carell), of whom she is scared at first. (I should mention the IFs in this movie are CGI.) But she soon learns he's friendly. Blue and Blossom live with the guy who had told her to go away, a man named Cal (Ryan Reynolds), who tries to unite IFs with kids, after the ones who had created them in the first place grow up and forget about them. Cal takes Bea to meet other IFs who live in a sort of retirement home, under an apparently abandoned amusement park. There are lots of IFs there (with a pretty impressive voice cast), but the main one Cal introduces her to is a wise old teddy bear IF named Lewis (Louis Gossett Jr.) Bea decides she wants to help Cal place IFs with new kids.

So, that sets up the basic plot of the movie. I should mention that while visiting her father in the hospital, Bea meets another patient, a young boy named Benjamin. She tries to set him up with an IF, but he can't see any of the ones she tries to introduce him to. Eventually, Bea wants to reunite IFs with their original kids, including Blossom, who she learns was her grandmother's IF. (I gotta say, Blossom looks like she's from at least one generation before the grandmother's time.) There's also a plot twist that I spent pretty much the whole movie expecting, and I would have been upset if I had turned out to be wrong. But I was right, so that's nice. Anyway, I don't want to spoil any more details of the plot, but the movie does have a pretty happy ending. And I definitely enjoyed watching the movie.