The Grinch review – an unwanted Christmas gift

Dr Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! has been adapted for the screen before – Boris Karloff voiced the furry green festive grump in 1966; Jim Carrey at his charmless worst starred in the horrorshow 2000 live-action movie. Now comes another animation, which takes the book’s message that you can’t buy Christmas and tops it up with noisy, wacky capering, squishing and flattening Seuss’s universe into yet another bland frenetic kids’ movie.

Benedict Cumberbatch with an American accent does a decent job voicing the Grinch, who lives on a mountain high above the gingerbread-pretty town of Whovillle, where festive goodwill is spreading like an epidemic. Like that other noted Christmas-hater, Scrooge, there’s an explanation for his shrivelled heart that’s rooted in the Grinch’s backstory – growing up unloved in an orphanage where Christmas came not even once a year.

To destroy the fun for everyone else, this year the Grinch is impersonating Santa to steal the town’s presents. At the same time, cute-as-a-button poppet Cindy Lou (Cameron Seely) cracks a plan to trap Santa as he comes down the chimney to be doubly sure her Christmas wishes come true.

As the narrator, Pharrell Williams delivers Seuss’s sing-song rhymes beautifully, and the animation is tip top. There are also a couple of corking scenes that put Cumberbatch to work. In the best of them, the Grinch ventures into town to do his groceries, stamping on the townsfolks’ Christmas cheer and merriment with malicious glee.

More bah-humbuggery – which of course ought to be recognised as a rational response to the wall-to-wall Christmas jumpers – and less zany antics here would have done the job better. As it is, the movie may leave you feeling like you’ve been standing on the escalator in Hamley’s for 90 minutes during the Christmas rush.