The world’s scariest accountant is back. Behold the teeth spaced like Stonehenge, the body bent into a permanent comma. This is not the umpteenth remake of “A Christmas Carol.” Umpteenth, we hit around the time Mr. Magoo played Ebenezer S.
Now the scoreboard reads umpteen plus a bajillion.
Instead of freshening the setting (à la Bill Murray’s “Scrooged”), warming up the chilly tone (alas, the perfect title — “Marley & Me” — is taken) or making the miser a fashionista (anybody want the film rights to my 2006 novel “A Christmas Caroline”?), writer-director Robert Zemeckis, whose recent credits include “The Polar Express” and the 3-D “Beowulf,” devises a full-on horror movie. Starring, er, Jim Carrey.
Carrey, playing Scrooge and two of the ghosts, isn’t bad (he is also barely recognizable, which is a bonus).
But three problems undermine the project. One: Rampaging goblins, a man being skeletonized, a chase with satanic stallions and a plunge into an infernal grave aren’t what you expect from a family holiday picture.
Two: The freaky humanoids created by the “Polar Express”-style animation (real actors slathered with digital effects) create what psychologists call an “uncanny valley” that keeps the viewer at a distance of mild repulsion. You don’t identify with Scrooge at any point, nor is blatant fakery scary. Picture “The Seventh Seal” with sock puppets. Or, considering all the soft plastic cheeks, you may be reminded of Cabbage Patch dolls. Some of the frightening figures are like Austrian marionettes from a particularly severe period, and the Ghost of Christmas Past, though accurately portrayed as a dwarf child with a flame coming out of its head, can be none other than the spawn of the Pillsbury Doughboy and Heat Miser.
As in Carrey’s last effort, “Yes Man,” there is almost zero comedy, though this time the choice appears to be intentional. The one play for big laughs is a bizarre newly imagined sequence in which a miniaturized Scrooge does slapstick with an “Alvin and the Chipmunks” voice. This bit was seemingly thrown in at the last minute or invented for the trailer, which relies heavily on it to make the film seem like a comedy adventure. The scene doesn’t work (the horror and comedy cancel each other out) and doesn’t belong.
The third and largest problem with the horror approach: How can you make viewers’ toes curl when every beat of the story is etched in the collective memory as deeply as a high school grudge? (Answer: if you’re Stanley Kubrick.)
As for kids who haven’t yet paid their first visit to the offices of Scrooge and Marley, Zemeckis stuffs their stockings with coal-black gobs of the original 1843 dialogue. (Would you even risk 1943 dialogue on a kid movie?) Waifs and urchins in the audience will be wondering how “the treadmill” could be a bad thing. (It was associated with prisons.) And what were “Union workhouses”? What’s up with lines like, “Let me see some tenderness connected to death or this chamber will forever haunt me”?
Zemeckis was determined not to do “How the Scrooge Saved Christmas” — no goofy back story, no smarmy one-liners, no renaming the character Ben or chimichangas at the Christmas feast. Unless the director was aiming for a Victorian “Black Christmas,” though, he overshot his mark.