Herald Rating: * * * *
Cast: Jim Carrey, Taylor Momsen, Jeffrey Tambor, Christine Baranski
Director: Ron Howard
Rating: PG
Running Time: 105 mins
Screening: Advance previews this weekend at Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas. Opens Thursday
Review: Graham Reid
Messing with a Dr Seuss story is like telling kids there's no ... Ronald McDonald.
But a movie of the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas story would be shorter than a sports item on television news.
So this colourful, visually flamboyant adaptation gives us a lengthy flashback explaining why the Grinch (Carrey beneath layers of green fun fur and prosthetics) is a misanthrope. It reveals nothing to say that he was teased at school. Childhood trauma, it seems. Well, it offers "closure" for kids, I suppose.
Despite this simplistic back-story, delivered in Seuss-like prose by narrator Anthony Hopkins, director Howard has created a cross-demographic Yuletide pleaser.
Kids will delight in a Grinch looking like the one in the book; the weird residents of Who-ville with turned-up snouts, disconcerting hairstyles, and unlovely Christmastime consumerism; the prat-falls and bizarre technology in the whacky mountain lair; the Grinch's put-upon dog Max ...
Real littlies will love the nauseatingly cute Momsen (in a Tracey Collins vertical-take-off hairstyle) as Cindy Lou-Who. Adults will find her hard to stomach and quibble about the shift of focus from the mean-spirited Grinch to this character (bet you can't remember her from the book) whose cloying niceness now drives the story.
For adult entertainment there is Who-ville's mayoral figure (Tambor, Hank from The Larry Sanders Show, as a typically pompous dignitary) and Martha May Whovier (Baranski, Cybill's martini-drinking sidekick on the small screen who again plays her part with barely suppressed sexuality).
Howard imbues Who-ville with a kitschy visual overkill of bright colours with faithfully Seuss-like architecture. The Whos race around hyperactively, Martha May has a terrifyingly efficient way of putting up Christmas lights, and things happen at breakneck speed unless they are slow and mawkish.
Carrey is an excellent, dark-hearted Grinch beneath his costume and mask. When he's mean, he's nasty and sour. But he also hams it like a mouse on meths, and the man behind the mask - a clown desperate to be liked and anxious to escape - intrudes with adult-oriented one-liners and his customary facial ticks. Such gestures to camera come as gratuitous cameos of himself.
There are also toothache-inducing songs which seem mandatory in movies aimed at kids. Those on the cusp of teenhood who we took along grew restless. But they liked the rest.
Being critical of a feelgood Christmas movie is Grinch-like, but it's fair to say this isn't quite the winner suggested by its box-office business Stateside.
Preteen kids, and adults who don't mind an agonisingly obvious back-story, will enjoy this high-energy slam-glam version of a classic children's story.
But I fear for The Lorax.
The Grinch
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