An unintentionally creepy Jim Carrey movie finds new life on streaming

Having apparently grown bored of churning out successful crowd-pleasers like the Back to the Future trilogy, Forrest Gump, What Lies Beneath and Cast Away, Robert Zemeckis decided that the best place for him to spend the bulk of the early 2000s was the uncanny valley.

The Polar Express and Beouwulf were nothing if not ambitious and impressive in their technical mastery, but it’s hard to connect on an emotional level with a movie where every single character is quite clearly dead behind the eyes, something that not even Tom Hanks could fix in the former.

Returning to the festive and star-studded well for a second time, Zemeckis’ 2009 A Christmas Carol saw Jim Carrey play Ebenezer Scrooge as well as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. The stacked ensemble also featured Gary Oldman, Robin Wright, Bob Hoskins, Colin Firth, Cary Elwes and more, but the performance capture was still distracting to the point of being off-putting.

Carrey does good work in multiple roles, and the visuals are fine, it’s just the unnerving human component that makes A Christmas Carol more creepy than joyous. That being said, it’s unsurprisingly enjoyed a December rebound on Disney Plus as per FlixPatrol, having crashed the most-watched list over the weekend.