Review: 'Spirited' wastes a good 'Christmas Carol' twist and the comic talents of Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell
The holiday comedy “Spirited” offers a promising twist on “A Christmas Carol,” featuring two really funny leading actors who riff well against each other — and, yet, it’s a damp squib of a Christmas cracker.
The story starts at what looks like the end of the story, as a neighborhood busybody (Rose Byrne, leading the parade of cameos) gets shown her sad, lonely death, and then comes out of her house on Christmas morning a changed person. It’s another triumph for the four ghosts — Jacob Marley (Patrick Page), and the Ghosts of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani), Present (Will Ferrell) and Yet-to-Come (Loren G. Woods in the suit, voiced by Tracy Morgan) — and their massive magical support crew.
There’s not much time to celebrate — though they do break for a musical number, because (as we’re told early) the afterlife is a musical — before they start planning for next year’s awful person to turn good. Christmas Present finds a particularly nasty target, a publicity consultant, Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), whose a one-man controversy-generating industry. When we first see him in action, he’s advising a trade group of Christmas tree farmers how to start whisper campaigns to make buying plastic trees un-American.
Marley objects to the choice, because Clint is labeled “unredeemable” — and only one other “unredeemable” case was ever turned good. But Christmas Present is adamant, so the effort to re-create parts of Clint’s past, present and future gets underway.
When Christmas Eve rolls around, the spirits discover something they haven’t encountered before: Clint doesn’t want to change his life, and starts needling Christmas Present about why he took this job in the first place.
What follows are some intriguing twists, including putting Clint’s assistant, Kimberly (Octavia Spencer), as his reluctant accomplice and a potential love interest for Christmas Present. Unfortunately, the plot is either heavily reliant or stopped dead in its tracks by the musical numbers, with songs written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the team who wrote more memorable numbers for “La La Land,” “The Greatest Showman” and “Dear Evan Hansen.”
The most consistent pleasures in this uneven movie are when Ferrell and Reynolds are onscreen together, comically insulting each other. Reynolds’ wise-acre verbal delivery turns out to be a good counterweight to Ferrell’s blustering goofball, and their friction does generate a few comedic sparks. So does Mani (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) as a very funny Christmas Past, her usual ethereal calm thrown for a loop when she starts lusting after Clint.
Director Sean Anders (“Instant Family,” “Daddy’s Home”), working with regular co-writer John Morris, can’t keep the premise afloat long enough to make it work, and he lets Reynolds’ and Ferrell’s refreshingly sour chemistry melt away into maudlin bro-love. It’s too bad, because “Spirited” had a chance to be the next great off-the-wall Christmas comedy.
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‘Spirited’
★★
Opens Friday, November 18, at some Megaplex theaters, and streaming on Apple TV+. Rated PG-13 for language, some suggestive material and thematic elements. Running time: 127 minutes.