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What’s the Story?

Reviewed byCharles Cassady Jr.
It's Christmas in New York City, and Frank Cross (Bill Murray), selfish, workaholic, hard-drinking, miserly, and manic president of a mythical American TV network, is overseeing, among other outlandish broadcast projects, a live Christmas Eve performance of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (the tale is called "Scrooge,' throughout, rather than its original title). Thinking only of money and ratings, Frank vulgarizes the classic plot with showgirls and mice (based on a theory that cats are developing TV-watching habits), shrugging off a Christmas-dinner invite from his brother and firing the one programming executive who questions him. Then, in the evenings leading up to the big show, Frank is himself visited by real-life Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future, who try to show him the error of his ways before it's too late.

Is It Any Good?

2
SCROOGED is a head-on crash of two family faves, A Christmas Carol and Ghostbusters, neither one quite winning out. Some early SNL folk worked on it -- Bill Murray most obviously, but also writer Michael O'Donahue, whose style of humor was often brutally dark. It's a strange, mood-swingy blend of mistletoe and graveyard mold that doesn't hang together gracefully. A good comedy-fantasy with some heart for the holidays may repose here, but the movie is heavily-tinseled by expensive production values, epic gags, and special effects that tend to go against Dickens' poignancy. The script eagerly does literal yuppie-bashing, as Frank Cross is physically pummeled and tortured; even with isolated genius moments (Christmas Past is a Yellow Cabbie in a time-travel taxi), you feel this property is exactly the sort of  gaudy and violent entertainment Frank Cross would air at Christmas. Murray himself, at his best underplaying, mugs hysterically. Kids might like that, but when he unintelligibly impersonates Welsh actor Richard Burton or quotes the plant from Little Shop of Horrors, it's funny stand-up but don't fit the character well.
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