How the Grinch Stole Christmas, made way back in 1966, is a timeless classic. You’d think, or at least hope, the studios would leave Dr. Seuss’s beloved story alone after the abomination that was Jim Carrey’s remake in 2000. But no, the Hollywood suits are back to take another shot with The Grinch.
The book is only 64 pages long, and the original animated show only runs 26 minutes, so they had to pad the story a lot to get a film with a runtime of almost an hour and a half. Cindy-Lou Who (Cameron Seely), “who was no more than two,” in the original looks to be about eight now and has a whole cadre of friends to cook up mischief with. Cindy-Lou’s mom (Rashida Jones) is a hard-working single mother, and there’s a whole story arc about that. The Grinch himself (Benedict Cumberbatch) gets a backstory about being a sad, lonely orphan during Christmas years ago. Apparently, he doesn’t hate Christmas so much as find it depressing. These stories all come off as filler, and none of them are compelling.
Max is cool. The Grinch. IMDb.com
Visually, The Grinch is CGI at its most vapid from beginning to end. It was the blandest, most boring-looking animated film I’ve seen in quite some time. It was the visual equivalent of eating plain oatmeal. Looking cartoony would probably have been an improvement.
The soundtrack was a bizarre mix of classic Christmas songs and rap/hip hop numbers. Pharrell Williams’ saccharine narration sounded like a jaded librarian drawing the short straw and having to read to a bunch of 3-year-olds at story time.
As for the story, we can’t have a Dr. Seuss movie without a life lesson, now can we? The book and original animation had a nice message at the very end about how Christmas means more than just presents and feasting. The Grinch relentlessly beats that message in with a sledge hammer. The Grinch even pauses before carving the roast beast to give a speech about it, just in case you somehow managed to miss it. And since that was apparently not enough by itself, we also get the Grinch coming to terms with his past emotional trauma and Cindy-Lou’s selfless quest to get help for her mom.
The Grinch. IMDb.com
Max, the Grinch’s dog, was the only thing worth watching in this movie. Max was cool. I wish the film had been called Max and been told entirely from his point of view. Sadly, not even Max could save what was otherwise a soulless bowl of bland banality.
Overall rating: 4/10