Review: 'Ebenezer' gives Johnny Depp the chance to play Scrooge, but it's the audience that will say 'Humbug!' to this mirthless adaptation

It’s a Hollywood tradition to release a horror movie on Friday the 13th — and since we’re coming up on the Christmas season, somebody thought it was a good idea to make a horror thriller out of the best-known holiday story with ghosts in it.

That’s as good an explanation as any why director Ti West, the director of the “X”/“Pearl”/“MaXXXine” trilogy, would make “Ebenezer,” a horribly misguided take on Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” that will go down in history for Johnny Depp’s atrocious take on Ebenezer Scrooge.

The first words in Dickens’ 1843 novella are “Marley was dead; to begin with,” which is the first thing West and screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern get wrong. The movie starts with Marley (Ian McKellen) quite alive, working at a desk opposite Scrooge’s in their counting house, finding in each other’s sour company the only delight in their miserly lives. Then, a few minutes late, Marley croaks and Dickens’ opening line is restored.

For quite a while, West and Halpern follow the well-trod path of many far superior renditions of “A Christmas Carol,” with Scrooge enduring Christmas Eve visits from some charity fundraisers and his good-natured nephew Freddy (Sam Claflin). Depp recites some of the famous lines — like “if they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population” — like a high schooler in a memorization assignment. 

Depp delivers a Scrooge who’s cantankerous on the surface without not much going on below. That doesn’t improve when Scrooge is confronted by four ghosts: Marley, followed by the spirits of Christmas past (Andrea Riseborough, pale and ethereal), Christmas present (Trammel Tillman, desiccated and not the jolly figure often portrayed) and Christmas yet to come (Robert Strange, shrouded in a black cloak and CGI smoke effects). When West thinks the audience is getting bored, he had Scrooge open a door and have other spirits attack for a Victorian jump-scare version of “Night of the Living Dead.”

I nearly forgot Scrooge’s long-suffering clerk, Bob Crotchet, but mostly because the movie nearly does, too. Here, he’s played by Rupert Grint, and you wish West would just let us hang out with him and his family, who seem to be having more fun than anyone else in this macabre take on the classic.

(If you need a movie version of this story for your Christmas viewing, I recommend the 1951 version with Alastair Sim or “The Muppet Christmas Carol” from 1992 with Michael Caine. Merry Christmas to all, and God bless us, every one!)

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‘Ebenezer’

★1/2

Opens Friday, November 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for frightening material. Running time: 116 minutes.