Spirited Review: A Christmas Carol Gets a Bah-Humbug Musical Makeover

Spirited proceeds as a parade of limply ironic pop-culture references and name-drops.

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Spirited
Photo: Apple TV+

Sean Anders’s Spirited is desperate to ride the coattails of John Favreau’s Elf. That film shrunk its story to fit the talents of Will Ferrell, more or less letting him command the screen with a wide grin and a goofy hat throughout. Spirited, though, fundamentally misunderstands how to utilize Ferrell and fellow funnyman Ryan Reynolds. Rather than setting up a basic premise and letting them play off of one another—or, better yet, constructing flesh-and-blood characters—Anders and co-writer John Morris drown the actors in exposition, tired digressions, and, worst of all, one ear-splitting musical number after another.

Suggesting Scrooged by way of La La Land, Spirited proceeds as a parade of limply ironic pop-culture references and name-drops. Before the plot is set into proper motion, the Ghost of Christmas Present (Ferrell) is handed a coffee while standing in a graveyard and he jokes in voiceover that he’s Brad Pitt, before backtracking and clarifying that he’s only joking—that he’s actually not Brad Pitt. Somewhat less leftfield, Present later remarks that PR douchebag Clint Briggs (Reynolds) is “the perfect combination of Mussolini and Seacrest.”

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Present’s work involves “haunting” blowhards like Briggs, to help set them straight, and when Present and his crew are on the job, they follow Briggs as he talks to his assistant, Kimberly (Octavia Spencer): Briggs is planning to have Billie Eilish and Ed Sheeran, both clients of his, fake a beef and then issue an apology in order to drum up some quick interest. Were Spirited a covert satire of, say, PR strategies in an era of increasingly hostile online cultures, this brand of referentiality might at least make thematic sense. But the film is nothing but a mélange of half-formed contemporary comedic ideas loosely grafted onto Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

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More egregious, though, are the musical numbers, which total close to a dozen across the film’s runtime. Conceived in the tonal spirit of early ’90s Disney animated films like Beauty and the Beast, these more-sincere-than-funny numbers are premised on the fact that Ferrell, Reynolds, and Spencer won’t be winning Grammys for their singing anytime soon.

To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame one. Early on, while standing in the graveyard, Present asks in voiceover while the scene fades up: “Do people really change? I mean, real, lasting, positive change?” Spirited can’t be bothered to clarify its interest in such a question beyond the meager gesture to Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge, who transforms from a penny-pinching overlord into a generous employer by the end of A Christmas Carol. Anders and company are more in the business of littering scenes with stupid one-liners, as when Present, having transported himself and Clint to the 19th century for reasons that don’t matter one bit, says, “You can kiss my Dickens, son!” Or consider Christmas-Yet-To-Come (Tracy Morgan) telling someone, “You’ve been Christmas Caroled, bitch!”

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Naturally, Spirited insists on playing up the schmaltz in its third act, but none of this pathos resonates beyond its positioning within predictable, template-oriented screenwriting. Clint’s about-face from jerk to gent is assured, and Present’s blossoming affection for Kimberly after the former is brought from the spirit realm into the people realm leads both to unfortunate duets and, worst of all, a discussion of corn dogs at a Christmas party. Tellingly, someone is dressed as Ferrell’s Buddy from Elf at that party, though Spirited makes nothing of this moment aside from letting it come and go as an obvious nod to Ferrell’s enduring role. And that, in the end, is what the film amounts to: a half-hearted, feature-length wink.

Score: 
 Cast: Will Ferrell, Ryan Reynolds, Octavia Spencer, Sunita Mani, Tracy Morgan, Patrick Page, Rose Byrne, Judi Dench  Director: Sean Anders  Screenwriter: Sean Anders, John Morris  Distributor: Apple TV+  Running Time: 127 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2022

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

2 Comments

  1. I agree! I didn’t have high hopes when I started the movie but I really enjoyed it. When Yet-To-Come finally overcomes his muteness to use his catchphrase “You’ve been Christmas-caroled bitch” I actually had to pause for 10 minutes to laugh. Good Christmas movie.

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