Spirited (2022)

Directed by Sean Anders. Starring Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds, Octavia Spencer, Patrick Page, Sunita Mani, Aimee Carrero, Andrea Anders, Joe Tippett, Marlow Barkley, Lily Sullivan, (voice) Tracy Morgan. [PG-13]

In a world where Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” exists, and all the film adaptations exist (including Scrooged), and, as revealed about halfway through, Ebenezer Scrooge was a real person, there exists a team of afterlife ghosts who do “the ‘Christmas Carol’ thing” on one good-for-nothing soul every year begging for redemption. This year, they choose someone the Ghost of Christmas Present (Ferrell) believes is “unredeemable”, a heartless media consultant played by Ryan Reynolds. At this point in their respective careers, neither star takes even a half-step out of their edgeless comfort zones aside from perhaps the singing—it’s a musical—and since their voices are merely adequate and the songs less than that, it’s a “no risk, no reward” situation. This is an odd and mostly unsuccessful hybrid of the sincere and the fatuous, of wild comic ideas like the Ghost of Christmas Past (Mani) having offscreen sex with her “perp” so she can step aside and let Ferrell hold the spotlight longer, of random in-name-only romance sparking between Ferrell and Reynolds’ assistant (Spencer, in the barely-paralleled Bob Cratchit role), of scattershot subplots added and dumped without a moment’s notice, of uneven attempts at delivering awkward pathos (some groundwork was laid for the cancer stuff, but the teenage suicide is handled very poorly). In the end, it’s a bloated mess, and with sub-par writing failing to give Ferrell and Reynolds the material to bust loose and be funny, it rarely even offers passing pleasures of goofy good fun. Humbug on their boardroom-and-focus-group-tainted cowardice! Rose Byrne and Judi Dench make cameo appearances.

40/100