Disney's a Christmas Carol: Critic Reviews

All style and no substance, Disney's A Christmas Carol is a yawn inducing retread of a tired fable.

Disney's A Christmas Carol is a marvelous and touching yuletide toy of a movie, and the miracle is that it goes right back to the gilded Victorian spirit of those black-and-white films of yore.

A branded piece of shiny seasonal entertainment.

There is a weird lack of passion here, almost condescension, a sense that Scrooge's agonised moral journey into his past is potentially pretty dull, and so Zemeckis is always livening things up by whooshing the old miser excitingly through the night sky.

A re-telling should either present a resonant or fresh thematic take. This Christmas Carol seems like a pale ghost of Dickens' magical Christmas classic.

It's a heartwarmer that doesn't have much of a heart itself.

Shockingly, the new film turns out to be very good, at times close to brilliant: a darkly detailed marvel of creative visualization that does well by Dickens and right by audiences -- when it's not trying to sell them a theme park ride.

A Christmas Carol is a whiz-bang 3-D thrill-ride with all the emotional satisfaction squeezed out of it.

As the lead character, Carrey's CG-created body is spindly and bent, and he has fun with his vocal performance, turning every word into a strangled hiss.

To put it bluntly, if Scroogely, Disney's 3-D animated version of A Christmas Carol is a calamity.

A Christmas Carol is a worthy stab at mixing old and new, a vintage tale done with some fresh dazzle and a reminder that the movies can still bring the wow.

Does this entertainment achieve a timelessness beyond its exquisite source material? Not even. Yet there's pleasure to be had and relief in feeling the filmmakers didn't Scrooge it up either.

The movie may be yet another retelling of an iconic story, but visually it is often quite breathtaking.

The story that Dickens wrote in 1838 remains timeless, and if it's supercharged here with Scrooge swooping the London streets as freely as Superman, well, once you let ghosts into a movie, there's room for anything.

Just when you give up on it, usually in the middle of its latest, extraneous, gyroscoping thrill-ride sequence, Zemeckis reminds you that he's capable of true visual dynamism, enhanced but not wholly dictated by the digital landscape he so clearly adores.

Zemeckis captures all the story's terror, but its pathos has always been the real challenge, and it mostly eludes him.

Carrey's performance as the miserly misanthrope is lost amid effects more typically encountered in theme-park and video-game adventures. (P.S.: Is it just me, or does it also peeve you that the Mouse House claims proprietary rights on Dickens' title?)

Favors thrill-ride effects that are more often the star than the servant of the story. It's like "Silent Night" played by Led Zeppelin.

Want the creeps for Christmas? Then check out the latest version of A Christmas Carol.

Shortchanging traditional animation by literalizing it while robbing actors of their full range of facial expressiveness, the performance-capture technique favored by director Robert Zemeckis looks more than ever like the emperor's new clothes.

You don't identify with Scrooge at any point, nor is blatant fakery scary. Picture The Seventh Seal with sock puppets.

By Fezziwig, that story still works and tugs at the heart. It would even if each ghost's visit weren't scored with overly-suitable Christmas carols.

It's like taking a Christmas wreath and dipping it in wax or laminating a Christmas card in plastic. Zemeckis risks creating another Yule ghoul: the Ghost of Christmas Without Soul.

There's a lot of dark magic in this Dickensian Yuletide.