The Grinch Wastes Cumberbatch’s Skills And Your Time

Pop quiz, what do get when you combine one the holiday season’s most iconic stories with a generic playlist of Christmas carols and hymns, and an attempt to reinvent the wheel? The answer would be…this movie!

In the 2018 interpretation of Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas, lovingly dubbed The Grinch, Benedict Cumberbatch takes on the voiceover role of the mean green one himself.

The narrative more or less unchanged from its various incarnations; with that said it has more in common with the live action version directed by Ron Howard well over a decade ago.

Visually the movie pops with vivid colors, however the occasional recurring lens flare overstayed its welcome as far as I was concerned. The studio Illumination Entertainment got two of its best directors to give the audience some bang for their buck, Yarrow Cheney and Scott Mosier.

But I am sad to say that once I got past gorgeous wrapping, I was more disappointed than a 8 year-old who got crew socks for Christmas.

The script basically trades the generic love story premise from the live action movie, for the “I’m a sad panda” generic premise. It’s still just as extraneous, Illumination!

Voice acting was competent. Keenan Thompson, Rasheeda Jones, and Angela Lansbury were all… in it. Sadly Cumberbatch was underutilized; in his vain attempt to impersonate Boris Karloff he robbed us of the majesty of his natural majestic speaking voice. It would have sounded so much better than the nasally whiny sound he gave as a performance here.

And the music… Illumination’s music budget must have been just enough to afford a Time/Life Holiday Music Collections album, because there was no effort put into this soundtrack whatsoever.

Nobody asked for this movie, and no one needs to see it; it’s a soulless cash grab of a flick that embodies everything that Dr. Seuss tried to protest in his original book.I wouldn’t touch this movie again with a 39 ½ foot pole! And I give The Grinch (Universal Pictures, Illumination Entertainment; PG; 90mins) a 2 out of 5.