by Alex Bentley

A Christmas Carol spends all its time and money making things look good without bothering to give it a story to match.

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is one of the most adapted stories of all time. Its tale of a hard-hearted soul being redeemed after being shown the error of his ways has proven to be fodder for all sorts of interpretations, including modern updates, animated versions, musicals, and even one done with Muppets. In fact, 2009 has already seen a (bad) re-imagining of the story with Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.

Writer/director Robert Zemeckis has fallen hard for motion capture filmmaking, having used the animation technique that captures actual human movements and molds them onto digital bodies in his two previous films, The Polar Express and Beowulf. He's brought it back again for A Christmas Carol, and it's only the first of several missteps in this latest adaptation.

This version appears to be relatively faithful to the book, with Scrooge (Jim Carrey) spreading his bah-humbug charm to his employee, Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman), his nephew Fred (Colin Firth), a man collecting for charity (Cary Elwes), and generally anybody else who crosses his path. To try and get him to change his way of thinking, Scrooge is visited by three ghosts (all also played by Carrey) who show him how he's made mistakes in the past, what people think of him now, and what his future will be like if he continues down the same path.

Using the motion capture technique was a mistake because it affords Zemeckis a certain amount of laziness in casting the film. Nearly all of the main actors play multiple roles, which is interesting in theory, but actually comes off dull in practice as most of the film is essentially Carrey talking to himself. The animation is also still too strange to be fully engrossing. Though it's advanced beyond the “dead eyes” that were the bane of The Polar Express, many of the characters are way too creepy looking. This is especially true of Oldman as Cratchit and Firth as Fred – both characters retain enough of the actors' features to be recognizable, but their faces contain almost no emotion, giving their performances a stagnant feeling.

“Creepy” and “void of emotion” could describe the film as a whole. Don't be fooled by the Disney name on the film – this is perhaps the least family-friendly version of A Christmas Carol ever made. Despite having Carrey in the lead role, there is almost no humor to be had, and much of the imagery, especially in the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come section, is downright macabre.

Strangest of all, though, is the fact that a story that hinges on the emotional redemption of its main character is so stolid. Zemeckis has told the story in such a way that it contains the barest of exposition. On one hand that's understandable – the vast majority of people viewing the film know the basics of the story by heart. However, there's almost no set-up at the beginning of the film, so when it comes time for the emotional payoff at the end, there's not a wet eye in the house. Also, Scrooge seems to zip through each ghostly encounter so quickly that's it's a wonder he learns anything at all.

The story is set solidly in its original 19th century London location, so it's no surprise that most of the actors (save for Carrey) are British themselves. However, almost none of them are consistently intelligible. As a veteran of many a British film, I'm used to heavy accents, but the mush-mouthed speaking that abounded in this film only served to compound the lack of exposition. Pity the person who doesn't know the story ahead of time because the film throws up multiple obstacles to prevent that knowledge.

Like most animated films nowadays, the film is presented in 3D (you can also see it in 2D). There's no real reason to make the extra effort, though. Aside from the opening sequence that takes the viewer over, around, and through London's landscape (a sequence that is repeated so often it loses its potency), the effect of seeing it in 3D is almost negligible. Other parts of the film would have been impressive if the story attached to it were even halfway interesting. But A Christmas Carol makes the same mistake as many animated films, spending all its time and money making things look good without bothering to give it a story to match.

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