Scrooged (1988) adaptation of A Christmas Carol
Rating: 6/10
Plot: Television executive Frank Cross is a greedy son of a bitch who has alienated his lover, co-workers, and family. He’s visited by four ghosts around Christmas time and [Spoiler Alert!] changes his ways.
The problem with any version of A Christmas Carol is that the audience already knows the story so well and knows how it’s all going to end. It’s hard to get emotional about anything that’s going on with a Scrooge movie although the mute black kid almost got me.
Almost. As a modern comedic retelling of the classic story, this should have had a lot of surprises to make up for the lack of surprises in the borrowed structure for the story, but it really didn’t. In fact, I didn’t laugh a single time during this, and other than the lively Danny Elfman score–you can always tell when Danny Elfman is happening, can’t you?–and some creative and fun special effects and sight gags with John Forsythe’s Marley character, I didn’t have a good time at all with this.
Well, I take that back. I did like the line about how Charles Dickens would want to see a woman’s nipples. Truth is, I don’t know if I care for the Scrooge character arc anyway. I’ve always felt that the character’s transformation into an old guy giving away turkeys and hoisting crippled children on his shoulders was a little unrealistic and more the result of feeling threatened than actually wanting to make any changes or seeing any real light.
Murray’s character almost feels more contrived. He’s ludicrously terrible throughout the entire movie, every ounce of him except for his eyes in a couple scenes where the ghosts show him his past or present and there appears to be a little bit of soul in there somewhere. Bill Murray’s performance is all over the place.
He ranges from really overdoing things, grotesquely shouting lines in some attempt to squeeze out some funny that just isn’t there, to just phoning it in. Half the time, he seems bored by what’s going on. Walking Pet Peeve Bobcat Goldthwait gives a spirited performance as one of the two Bob Cratchetts in this thing.
There are scenes when he’s shooting large holes in the set with a shotgun, and that kind of feels like what he’s doing to the whole movie. There are some good performances though. Buster Poindexter’s OK as the Cabbie Ghost of Christmas Past, and Robert Goulet and Buddy Hackett both class things up a bit. But then again, there’s Carol Kane as the abusive Ghost of Christmas Present who brings this dark slapstick into the movie, alternating between kicking Murray’s character in the crotch and blowing raspberries.
Add in references to Chinese restaurants serving cats and weird Tab soft drink product placement and you really have a pretty unpleasant experience. The last twenty minutes or so, where Murray and Goldthwait drunkenly disrupt his station’s own adaptation of the Dickens’ story so that Frank Cross can stretch the “Hey, Boy. What day is this?” moment from every other retelling of this story into an endless hollering monologue are a major letdown.
When you hijack a live television performance with a firearm, I seriously doubt it matters what you say. You’re probably going to jail for a very long time. What a stupid ending to a movie that was struggling to work in the first place.
Next up in our Christmas Movie Extravaganza is the even more unpleasant Jingle All the Way.
