A Christmas Carol has survived Barbie, Mickey Mouse, Mr. Magoo and even Matthew McConaughey (if you count Ghosts of Girlfriends Past).
So if you're Jim Carrey and Robert Zemeckis, tackling yet another variation of Charles Dickens' Yuletide classic is like being Kenny Rogers' plastic surgeon or Amy Winehouse's new dealer: really, how could you do more damage than what's already been done?
Conversely, though, how do you reinvigorate a story that's been mounted more times than the cast of The Girls Next Door?
Considering Zemeckis' last two films were the computer-generated spectacles Beowulf and The Polar Express, it's no surprise he found his answer, not on the page, but in a hard-drive.
This Christmas Carol, rendered in immersive 3D animation, is Dickens as video-game designer, a morality play gussied up as a theme park ride.
Untethered by physics, Zemeckis' camera doesn't merely pan, it swoops and soars, dive-bombing industrial-age London with dizzying speed.
And if Carrey, who stars in multiple roles including that of mythical miser Ebenezer Scrooge, wasn't elastic enough already, here he's digitally outfitted with a pointed chin and hooked nose presumably to make his perpetual scowl disproportionately sharper.
Still, for all the whiz-bang imagery, this version is also markedly faithful -- aside from the odd burst of slapstick -- to the 1843 novella, lifting much of its dialogue from the original text and steering clear of obvious pop-culture gags; it hasn't been Shreked.
Rather, its London, besieged by grime and poverty, is disarmingly and appropriately dour -- a tone reflected by Scrooge himself who we first meet as he's removing the coins from the eyes of his recently deceased business partner, Jacob Marley.
Several years later, the stingy codger has grown only more sour and embittered as the Christmas season of merriment bears down on him.
He scoffs at charity, rejects spending Christmas dinner with his nephew Fred (Colin Firth) and makes life miserable for his clerk Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman).
He is overdue for a comeuppance and it arrives, as we all know, late on Christmas Eve with three ghosts -- all performed by Carrey -- who show Scrooge visions of his own past, present and future, each more frightening and vivid than the last.
First, there's the Ghost of Christmas Past, a flickering candle flame who recalls Scrooge's lonely childhood.
Next comes the Ghost of Christmas Present, a gregarious titan who lets Scrooge see how even poor men can attain a kind of wealth he'll never know.
And finally, there is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who offers Scrooge a glimpse of his own grim demise.
Yet for all the visual gusto and sensory overload on display, the film never musters much genuine emotion.
That's no fault of Carrey -- brilliant throughout -- but it does underscore the limitations of motion-capture technology which has neither the rapturous freedom of traditional animation nor the nuance of flesh-and-blood.
Even actors as gifted as Oldman, Firth, Bob Hoskins and Robin Wright Penn come across as rubbery and robotic, deprived of their internal combustibility.
There's no doubt Disney's A Christmas Carol succeeds in purely technical terms.
Too bad though, that for all the eye-popping spirits on screen, it lacks a soul.
(This film is rated PG)
More Movie Reviews
