Is It Worth the Watch?

As an experiment, one year I watched only holiday movies between Thanksgiving and Christmas (Except for one. I really need a frickin’ break … from all that … frickin’ joy). A new one to me was the live action How the Grinch Stole Christmas from 2000. Of course, I grew up with the 1957 book and the classic 1966 animated version featuring the voices of Boris Karloff and Thurl Ravenscroft, but I’d somehow missed this incarnation.

Director Ron Howard helms an adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ heartwarming story that contains eye-popping production design, jaw-dropping special effects and Oscar-winning make-up. However, the story of the mythic Whoville, a town where Christmas is nearly stolen by a heartless green monster, has been padded with so much unnecessary filler to insure a feature length running time, that the entire movie plays like an over-caffeinated pinball machine, and ends up being about as memorable as one. There’s never time to catch your breath, making the overwrought shenanigans seem unimportant.

Pointlessly frenetic Jim Carrey as the Christmas hating Grinch undermines almost every scene, whether comic or touching, with (ad libbed?) incongruous anachronistic lines that deflate the mood and emotional impact. He wants us to find him uproariously funny, but he isn’t. And why is he doing a Sean Connery impersonation, anyway? What’s that all about? 

Is It Worth The Watch? It’s not a terrible movie, but it could’ve been a lot funnier, much more touching, and spread infinitely more Christmas spirit. 

2000

105 minutes

Starring – Jim Carrey, Taylor Momsen, Jeffrey Tambor, Christine Baranski, Bill Irwin, Molly Shannon, Anthony Hopkins

Director – Ron Howard

Screenplay – Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman

Source – Dr. Seuss’ children’s book of the same name.