Spirited Parent Guide

Every year, the Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) chooses some malicious soul on Earth to be subjected to three ghostly visits, hoping to reform the person’s character and improve the world for everyone. With the help of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani) and Christmas Yet-To-Come (Tracy Morgan), Present has managed to reform a lot of people in his 200-plus years on the job. But this year, he wants to make a bigger splash: He wants to try and save a man so unpleasant, his file has been marked “Unredeemable”. Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), the man in question, works as a PR consultant, manufacturing scandal, sowing division, and generally making the world as unpleasant as possible, just to make a buck. If the three spirits can turn his life around, Briggs could have a positive impact on the lives of millions – if the spirits can put up with him long enough to fix him.

Despite being thoroughly overstuffed with Christmas cheer, the only emotion this film left me with was unbridled hostility. For starters, just because it’s a musical is no excuse to cram three irritating musical numbers into the first fifteen minutes. Second, there’s even less excuse to make a Christmas musical that’s over two hours long – especially since this movie could have been thoroughly wrapped up in 90 minutes without losing anything of value. Frankly, I think it could have been wrapped up in zero minutes without losing anything of value, but I’m not sure that was an option. And it’s a slow two hours, to boot.

As far as family audiences are concerned, this PG-13 movie adaptation might not be the squeaky clean holiday entertainment you were expecting. I definitely don’t recall any scatological profanity in the original novella and Charles Dickens didn’t include a subplot where the Ghost of Christmas Past hooks up with the person who needs to be reformed. Off-screen or not, that’s a weird twist to throw in here.

I suppose the upside of all this is that, if some enterprising individual were to attach some conductors to Charles Dickens’ rapidly spinning corpse, you could probably provide free energy to a large city. The original Christmas Carol is a work focused primarily on the evils of child poverty and reckless greed – issues which this film is not particularly interested in, preferring instead to focus on interpersonal behaviour. Sure, it would be great if we could all be a little kinder to one another here. But I’m not about to give the obscenely rich PR rep a break because he decided to stop ignoring his niece without addressing his hideous corporate record. And neither would Dickens, for that matter.