The best kind of children’s entertainment is the kind that appeals to adults, too. 

Or so I’ve been told. I don’t have kids, but my friends who are parents say the best things they watch with their children make a concerted effort to offer something for the older crowd. For years, Pixar has been the leading expert on this kind of thing. Those movies can make kids laugh while sneaking in a joke or two for their parents as well. They can be poignant and intelligent without talking down to their intended audience. But most of all, they carry a sense of wonder that children have and adults long to get back. 

This revelation about Pixar is nothing new, but it’s something I kept coming back to watching John Krasinski’s new film “IF.” And considering the film has been described as a “live-action Pixar film,” I don’t think it’s unfair of me to judge “IF” by that standard. Krasinski, to his credit, appears to be very earnest in his championing of the film as something he made for his own children, a way to sort of bridge that generational gap by encouraging adults to embrace the parts of themselves they left behind when they grew up. But if “IF” is about the wonders of childlike imagination, it lacks the imaginative spark that necessitates. 

“IF” stars Cailey Fleming as Elizabeth, or Bea, a 12-year-old girl who lost her mother at a young age. When her father (Krasinski) ends up in the hospital for an unnamed illness, she moves in with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) and develops the ability to see other people’s imaginary friends – or IFs, as they call themselves. The IFs Bea sees are ones whose children have grown up and left them alone. When she finds out her upstairs neighbor Cal (Ryan Reynolds) can see them too, she makes it her mission to reunite the IFs with their former kids. 

Krasinksi’s attempts to capture childhood wonder don’t always land, but are most successful in the film’s opening moments, before the IFs ever show up. “IF” opens with a home video montage of Bea and both of her parents before her mother’s death, the three of them doing magic tricks, finger painting, dancing around the living room to Tina Turner. There’s a switch about halfway through as the activities stay the same, but the location switches from a home to a hospital room, Bea’s parents trying to keep some semblance of creativity and joy alive even as the worst thing imaginable begins to happen. 

When we cut from the home videos to a slightly older Bea, her mother’s death has forced her to grow up a little bit quicker than normal. She comes across as a tiny adult, always insisting to the real adults around her that she is not a kid anymore. When her grandmother pulls out the paints that she used to play with as child, she emphatically states: “I’m 12. I don’t really do that anymore.” The paints are subsequently locked in the closet, along with the rest of Bea’s childhood. 

“IF” is at its most successful when it operates on an emotional level, particularly when it comes to the relationship between Bea and her father. Her father loves a practical joke and is always trying to make his very serious child laugh, especially when life gets hard. When we first meet him, he has dressed his hospital IV drip up as a woman and proceeds to dance with it, Fred Astaire style. When Bea shows up one day to his room and he’s not there, he has left behind a staged escape attempt, a rope made out of tied-together sheets hanging out the window. Bea often feels like the more mature one in this relationship, visiting him everyday without fail with a fresh set of flowers, trying to make him take things just a little bit more seriously. Fleming has a very solemn little face, and she plays this dynamic pretty well. 

Bea is a kid who has been through a lot, and the film’s central thesis seems to be that imagination can help kids cope when life gets unbearably hard. Imaginary friends are a big part of that, but it’s the sections of the film with the IFs – that is to say, most of the film – where “IF” loses any spark it had. The insistence that adults still need their imaginary friends to be there for them when they grow up wipes out the possibility of real human friends – something no adult in this movie seems to have – who could do the same. But even overlooking that fact, there’s a haphazard quality to the worldbuilding, and the design of the IFs themselves often feel less like something out of a kid’s mind and more like something an adult thought a child might find funny, for whatever reason. Bradley Cooper voices a water glass with a singular ice cube. There is also an invisible IF who never speaks named Keith, ostensibly played by Brad Pitt. 

“IF” never really rises to the level of its imaginative aspirations, particularly if Bea is meant to be the mastermind behind it all. During a section where she reimagines the layout of the retirement home where IFs live when their children grow up, an old teddy bear named Lewis (Louis Gossett Jr.) tells her she can transform the space into anything. There’s one interesting moment where Cal is trapped in a painting and forced to push his way out, but beyond that everything Bea comes up with feels bound to time and space even as we’re told her options are limitless. Considering the reveal of who Bea’s imaginary friend is (telegraphed from minute one), I’m not so sure her imagination is really up to carrying the weight of childhood fantasy on its shoulders – and neither is “IF.”