Scrooged

Bill Murray essaying Scrooge as a bottom-line network executive in a satirical take on A Christmas Carol sounds like a great idea on paper. In practice, well, it couldn’t decide how dark and weird or uplifting and generically funny it wants to be. Somewhere within Scrooged is a much better movie, but either way, Murray delivers a great performance.

Where Richard Donner went right in making this was in the casting. Sure, Karen Allen and Alfre Woodard are wasted in thankless and underwritten roles, but they do their best with the material as it is written. Doing much better work are the three ghosts that we meet: John Forsythe, Carol Kane and David Johansen (one of the ghosts is an impressive combination of makeup and puppetry). Kane in particular seems to be having a deliriously fun time and is, quite possibly, the comedic highlight of the film. But the film belongs to Murray’s patented insouciance and adds to it a surliness and cutthroat demeanor that would make even Gordon Gekko blush.

But Scrooged can’t decide how funny or dark it wants to be and switches back and forth between them constantly. It’s irreverent, for certain, and why not? Dickens’ story has been told so often that it deserves to have the piss taken out of it. But the jokes and setups need to pay off in a comedic way, not in a way that feels more bitter and angry than anything else. If nothing else, Scrooged can feel like an SNL sketch that’s been stretched, stuffed and padded to fill out the running time for a feature length film. But there’s a smart idea, a game cast, some nice makeup and special effects work, it’s a pity that the script kills what chances the film had as it was already halfway decent.