Christmas movies are already upon us, and major streamer Apple TV hopes they have a new holiday classic in "Spirited," a big-hearted-but-clumsy riff on Charles Dickens ' A Christmas Carol with two of the most likable movie stars alive. "Spirited" is like a big goofy puppy in how much it wants you to like it, and that eagerness to entertain can be its greatest strength and biggest weakness at the same time. It's overstuffed, cluttered, way too long, and ignores some basic tech elements like coherent editing and production design. But there are times when all of that can slip away under the sheer goodwill of the entire thing. It's almost like a community theater production of an original musical—so very rough around the edges but also pretty easy to root for in the end.
Sean Anders ("Daddy's Home") co-wrote and directed this admittedly clever variation on a tale that's been told by everyone from the Muppets to Bill Murray , but this is a different kind of Scrooge tale. What if the ghosts that haunted Ebenezer Scrooge on that fateful night did the same thing every year to a different troubled soul? "Spirited" imagines an entire spiritual industry built around redeeming one relentless jerk—and, yes, it does get into the idea that so much energy expended on one person in an era of social media hit jobs that manipulate thousands is like a drop in a bucket. Still, facilitator Jacob Marley ( Patrick Page ) believes there's value in their process, and he leads a massive team that researches each year's chosen miser.
The team thinks they have a perfect choice in a Vancouver hotel manager who yells at janitors, but the Ghost of Christmas Present ( Will Ferrell ) runs into a speaker at the hotel named Clint Briggs ( Ryan Reynolds ), realizing he is the white whale. Briggs is a social media manipulator, introduced singing a song—oh yeah, this is a full-throated musical—about weaponizing the war on Christmas for profit. He is the kind of businessman who doesn't see moral lines as long as his client wins, even if the client is his niece Wren ( Marlow Barkley ), who he convinces to do opposition research and social media shaming on her rival for a position at school. Clint's assistant Kimberly ( Octavia Spencer ) looks like she has been worn down by the moral failures of her boss, but Clint doesn't see himself as a force for bad. He's just one of those guys who believes that hitting first is the best strategy. (And it's a minor flaw of the film that the writers seem unwilling to make Clint too "unredeemable" and risk alienating viewers against one of their lovable leads.)
Ferrell's ghost becomes obsessed with redeeming Clint, even as the other spirits ( Sunita Mani plays Past and Tracy Morgan voices Yet to Come) get sidelined. Surprisingly, "Spirited" becomes as much The Ghost of Christmas Present's tale as it is Clint's, as Ferrell's character wants to leave it all behind and become human again, especially after finding an unexpected reason to rejoin the mortal coil.
All of this is told through the hyperactive energy of what feels at times like a draft for a stage musical both in function and form. Musical numbers explode with choruses of backup singers/dancers playing to one side of a set as if they're on a stage. The sense that you're watching a filmed stage musical extends to the production design, which often looks like cheap sets or green screen backgrounds instead of actual physical spaces. And the writing has that Broadway tendency to hit a few of the same beats over and over again, especially in the final acts of the film, which push this overlong musical to over two hours.
Despite all of those flaws, "Spirited" is a hard movie to slam. There's a "let's put on a show" energy in the performances of Reynolds, Ferrell, and Spencer that's easy to like. No one is phoning this thing in (even if Ferrell might have been served by another singing lesson or two) and that kind of energy can be infectious. Holiday movies don't have to be perfect. We kind of like them when they're a little rough around the edges, something that can boost the mood of an entire family over winter break as they've turned off their critical weapons and just want something that goes down easy. In that "spirit," this one works.
On Apple TV Plus today.
Brian Tallerico
Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.
- Ryan Reynolds as Clint Briggs
- Will Ferrell as Ghost of Christmas Present
- Octavia Spencer as Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
- Sunita Mani as Ghost of Christmas Past
- Aimee Carrero as Nora
- Brad E. Wilhite
- Dominic Lewis
- John Morris
- Sean Anders
Cinematographer
- Kramer Morgenthau
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‘Spirited’ Review: A Whole Lot of Humbug
Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell star in this musical spin on “A Christmas Carol” from Apple TV+.
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By Maya Phillips
Weeks before rabid hordes of consumers descend upon department stores like the avian menace in a Hitchcock film, before neighborhood dogs daintily lift their legs to the stripped-down sidewalk pines left for dead in the cheerless days of January, I’ve had an early Christmas revelation: Scrooge was onto something. All his grinching doesn’t seem so far-fetched; ol’ Ebenezer probably lost out on a Black Friday sale or watched too many bad Christmas movies, because after viewing the Sean Anders film “Spirited,” I’m feeling plenty humbuggy myself.
It’s not just that this Apple TV+ film (now in theaters, streaming on Nov. 18) is the billionth adaptation of “A Christmas Carol”; Dickens was such an O.G. that we’ve been understandably obsessed with retelling his story ever since. The issue is that the apish film is reminiscent of all the worst qualities of the newest holiday-ready tech fresh from the foothills of Cupertino, Calif.: It looks expensive and attempts to do everything at once, but it’s more shine than substance — and about as funny as the market price of a new iPhone.
“Spirited” attempts to invert Dickens’s story, making the ghosts into the heroes. The Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) is feeling disillusioned with his haunting job alongside his colleagues Jacob Marley (Patrick Page), the Ghost of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani) and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (Loren Woods, and voiced by Tracy Morgan). He’s started to wonder whether their hauntings make any real difference in the world.
For his next redemption project, Present chooses Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), a cynical, self-serving marketing executive who spins lies and manufactures conflicts on social media for a living. He’s a willful Scrooge, a charismatic combination of, as Present says, Mussolini and Ryan Seacrest. As Present helps guide Clint through his Dickensian journey, each step of the way Clint turns the tables, unpacking Present’s existential crisis and the past he himself has tried to avoid.
And did I mention it’s a musical? Yes, “Spirited” makes the bold choice to be a movie musical starring two actors who can’t sing. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“La La Land,” “The Greatest Showman”) are among the songwriting team, combining pat lyrics with the forgettable melodies of the composer Dominic Lewis. There’s Chloé Arnold’s showstopping choreography at least, a dazzling combination of tap, hip-hop and jazz performed by a massive ensemble of background singers and dancers. But the combination of this fine-tuned spectacle with the ineffectual vocals of the main duo — and distractingly uncanny visuals and special effects — transforms “Spirited” into a disjointed movie musical with all the superficial trappings of a Broadway flop.
The movie unwisely banks on the marketability of its two lead characters, whose merciless mugging and strong-armed repartee makes for humor as hammy as the honey-glazed cornerstone of a holiday feast. The film also muscles in references to fake news, Twitter trolls and cancel culture (along with a pandemic joke), obnoxiously pointing out its wisecracks as it makes them as though the movie’s meta-awareness absolves it of its tedious comedy — but you can’t have your fruit cake and eat it too.
Two hours is too generous a running time for this film’s sprawling mess of a plot, which uses Reynolds’s story line to deflect from a cliché narrative with a cringe-worthy romantic side plot. The movie ends up jumping around haphazardly from Clint’s arc to Present’s, trying to honor both equally and balance the traditional Christmas carol template with its modern-day twists and reversals.
When Marley appears, with his chains and ghostly baggage in tow, to warn Clint of the hauntings to come, Clint repeatedly interrupts his introduction song to get the story straight: This is going to be “A Christmas Carol,” right? Like “Scrooged”?
“Yes, like the Dickens book and the Bill Murray movie and every other adaptation nobody asked for,” Marley says impatiently.
True — this “Christmas Carol” wasn’t on anyone’s wish list for the holiday. When it comes down to Dickens’s 19th-century classic, Bill Murray and the muppets already wore it best.
Spirited Rated PG-13 for some naughty-list language. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters.
Maya Phillips is a critic at large. She is the author of the poetry collection “Erou” and “NERD: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse,” forthcoming from Atria Books. More about Maya Phillips
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‘Spirited’ Review: Ryan Reynolds Bugs the Dickens out of Will Ferrell in Clever ‘Christmas Carol’ Flip
It takes a while to warm up, but this musical update of a holiday classic — featuring a couple catchy new songs from Pasek and Paul — should make for 'good afternoon' viewing this season.
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Nothing makes me feel Scroogier than a slapped-together Christmas movie, which, thanks to the algorithms of tech companies-turned-content creators, start to drop in late October (even before Halloween) at a rate of nearly a dozen a week. This year, Netflix has entries planned with Lindsay Lohan and Freddie Prinze Jr., Disney+ is doing “The Hip Hop Nutcracker,” Lifetime gives us “Merry Textmas” and more, while Hallmark Channel has “#Xmas” and “Three Wise Men and a Baby,” in addition to its annual Luke Macfarlane canoodle.
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Anders knows that today’s audiences don’t want a musical, and so he adopts the unfortunate smart-alecky tone that will come to define this decade of cinema. You know the one: It’s that arm’s-length sense of irony we get in Disney’s “Tangled” or Taika Waititi’s “Thor: Ragnarok,” where the film immediately starts to undermine itself, acting as though audiences have seen the same story a thousand times before and will only go along if the movie is self-aware enough to acknowledge that it’s lame. In “Spirited,” the instant Ferrell bursts into song, Marley interrupts him and begs him to stop. The problem with this meta approach (which is effectively Reynolds’ brand, from “Deadpool” to “Free Guy”) is obvious: When the movie stops taking itself seriously — or sincerely — why should we?
Still, Anders makes sly use of his co-leads’ star personas, contrasting Ferrell’s doofy guilelessness with Reynolds’ relatively sardonic sensibility. And he has a secret weapon in Octavia Spencer, who’s sincerity personified. Clint runs a cutthroat marketing agency, and Spencer plays his right-hand woman, Kimberly, who specializes in digging up dirt on their opponents — even when the “client” is Clint’s eighth-grade niece (Marlow Barkley), and the opponent is the well-meaning classmate she’s running against for student council president. This is a promising subplot, since most “Christmas Carol” adaptations are inherently Capraesque, whereas watching a shark like Clint sink his teeth into a junior high student-government campaign skews closer to David Mamet or Armando Iannucci territory.
After a couple clunky numbers featuring a lot of over-excited choreography and entirely too much tapping, Spencer’s “The View From Here” is the first genuinely good song (with a few more to come): a heartfelt solo from a conflicted good person who sold her soul for a corner office. Kimberly sings to herself in private, but Anders blocks the scene with Ferrell’s “Roberto” (the amusing impromptu alias he assumes when asked) listening in, invisible to her, but clearly smitten in our eyes. Per the movie’s rules, Ferrell’s character is overdue for retirement, and when he does decide to take it, he’ll be permitted to return to Earth and live again. Guess who will motivate him to go back.
For audiences cliché-savvy enough to appreciate the movie’s self-skewering sense of humor, this all plays out pretty much as they’d expect. But that doesn’t mean “Spirited” can’t still surprise. Without spoiling the joke, let’s acknowledge that the film contains the year’s funniest musical number in “Good Afternoon,” a Dickensian duet between Reynolds and Ferrell that ranks right up there with Monty Python’s most irreverent songs — and which ought to appeal to everyone’s inner Scrooge, this grinchy critic’s included.
Reviewed at Crescent Screening Room, Los Angeles, Nov. 7, 2022. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 127 MIN.
- Production: An Apple TV+ release of a Gloria Sanchez, Two Grown Men, Maximum Effort Prods. production. Producers:
- Crew: Director: Sean Anders. Screenplay: Sean Anders, John Morris. Camera: Kramer Morgenthau. Editor: Brad White. Music: Dominic Lewis. Songwriters: Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, Khiyon Hursey, Sukari Jones, Mark Sonnenblick.
- With: Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds, Octavia Spencer, Patrick Page, Sunita Mani, Loren Woods, Tracy Morgan, Joe Tippett, Marlow Barkley, Aimee Carrero, Andrea Anders, Jen Tullock.
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