SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

elainehowie I love this film! It is unique, touching and really funny! It's a film that really gets you into the Christmas spirit while still providing an intriguing storyline. The grinch is portrayed amazingly by Jim Carey and is worth watching for him alone. Cindy Lou Who is also likeable. It has lots of great laughs and the grinch is more relatable than one might first imagine! It also has a satisfactory conclusion and leaves you looking forward to rewatching it next year.

millerlc-15354 Depending on why you've decided to watch this movie, you'll either love it or hate it. For me, I was looking for another fun Christmas movie to add to the list because it's my favorite time of year. Man, was I disappointed. Although the plot is obviously well-known, the incorporation of human characters made it more frightening than memorable. On one hand, I will admit that the make-up and costume department did a phenomenal job, but on the other hand, I found the whole cast to be more likely to be seen in a horror movie. I was unable to connect with the characters because I simply felt repulsed by them throughout the entirety of the film. Beloved classics like "Where Are You Christmas" sung by Cindy Lou Who were cringe-worthy instead of charming. The best movies for me are the ones where you're transported into that reality and for the duration of the film, you forget where you are. Throughout How the Grinch Stole Christmas, I was looking at my watch rather than glued to the screen. Although, I will say that Jim Carrey did a phenomenal job embracing the character and making it his own. Unfortunately for me, I found the Grinch to be dull and not as comical as he was meant to be. If you come into this movie looking for nothing more than background noise to open presents to, then this is the movie for you. I found it to be neither emotional nor exciting, adventurous nor inspiring. The main character, the Grinch, summed up my feelings about the production with a perfect quote, "Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, double hate, loathe entirely."

GeorgeTheRat Definetaly, one of the best Chrismas films a have ever seen. Nice scenary, good laughs and sure has a perfect plot for the Christmas spirit! Watched it twice and gonna watch it again.

sharky_55 Some things are just not meant to be live action. Dr Seuss must have been rolling in his grave as his second wife sold the film rights of his Christmas hit to Universal Pictures, who then ran with the idea that live action was the way to re-imagine these beloved children's books. They would begin the Dr Seuss cinematic universe and fill their films with big name comedic stars to draw in audiences. They would stretch 30 page picture books into bloated, overstuffed feature length films. They would replace the simple, economical illustrations of the original with grotesque costumes and lurid colour schemes (Bo Welch, the director of The Cat in the Hat, began his career as a production designer in Tim Burton films such as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, and copy and pasted the same eye-popping style into his own film). Gone was the playful bounce of the Seuss rhymes; a dark menace replaces the atmosphere hanging over Whosville as Christmas approaches. The town was once a circle of warmth and generosity, until a Christmas ghoul by the name of Ron Howard came along and turned it into the capital of greed and consumerism. The film takes something well meaning and good hearted and turns it into a garish toyland to serve its extended plot. Given the challenge of forcing a hour plus long conflict from a picture book, the script turns the story on its head - it was actually the Grinch who was the original victim, a case of schoolyard bullying, and the Whos who become the villains. Seeing the makeup of these Whos, it's hard not to agree - they've taken quaint cartoon figures and replaced them with life sized humanoids sporting button noses that make them look like some god-forsaken pig-dog mutation out of a secret government lab. Perhaps Howard realised that such monstrosity could not be the heart of the film; no wonder the most innocent of all the Whos, precocious little six year old Cindy Lou, never has to sit in that makeup chair. Her character must over-correct for all the Who buffoonery with a cloying sweetness that by now has become a holiday cliche. If you didn't hate Christmas like the Grinch does during the opening credits, you just might after a little girl keeps popping up to shove tinsel and mince pie in your face. Creepy as the Whos are, they are no match for the real antagonist of the story, the eponymous green Grinch who lives up in the mountains and is revered as a Christmas legend. The script's attempts to humanise him this time around via flashback only serve to make audiences recoil further; his junior form is propped up on the school chair like a creepy puppet, forced sympathy engineered on strings. His adult self isn't the Grinch. It's Jim Carrey in a green fur suit, with a transatlantic-Connery-esque growl thrown in for good measure. Maybe executives were drawn to the manic energy of a Carrey, of a Myers. They thought they could ride on the screen power of these comic icons and then slap on a Seuss label. Carrey is aggressively twisted, and not in a good way. One could barely stand the sight of him with a pot belly and nothing else (clothing for his bottom half is optional, apparently), gyrating and sashaying all over the place. Seeing him fidget and snarl, seeing him shove those hairy pipe cleaners he calls fingers into his nostrils and crunch beer bottles with his fangs, we can see this isn't the mischievous fiend that Seuss envisioned. This is our drunk uncle in a creepy Halloween costume, belching all the way into December. Getting Carrey allows them a little mileage for a few elongated action sequences, if only to further press the point that everything the Grinch touches turns to disaster (the camera assumes the position of some drunk bird that can't stop tilting its head). It's too bad that most of this action mimics the same juvenile trash that belongs in cheap sitcoms. You know, crotch humour, exaggerated slapstick, Grinch getting catapulted right into a woman's cleavage, or pinning mistletoe on his behind. Most of it is pitched at a juvenile level but actually aimed at adults; kids won't recognise the Chariots of Fire theme, or register any of his extended stand-up monologues (to himself), and when Carrey winks and talks right into the camera it's just another gag ("And this time I'll keep it off."). They've never seen the Chuck Jones cartoon anyway, for comparison. I'm actually impressed at how atrocious this adaptation is. It takes a great deal of talent and incompetence to turn a cartoon classic into this gaudy, useless trinket. Is there any upside? Well, at least it isn't as bad as The Cat in the Hat.