Christmas Countdown Day 25: Scrooged

Yet another Christmas Carol adaptation, but this time with Bill Murray’s style of humour and a nice heaping of snark. This time the ‘Scrooge’ is instead Frank, a powerful but lonely man who needs to remember how to open himself up to others again, but these ghosts are far more aggressive than the ones you might be used to in other versions.

Merry Christmas! While we are still in our section of slight creepy takes on the season, we had to have the Christmas Day review be something that truely captured the spirit of the season. Nothing does that better than a good Carol adaptation, although it has to be said, there are far more bad ones than good ones. Scrooged is the perfect version of this story in my eyes, while I love the Muppets version it is nice to see one not made for children.

If you love any version of the story but would like a more adult take on the story this film has got you covered. I really enjoyed the ‘modern’ takes on the roles, Bill Murray’s Frank is a heartless television network manager instead of a money lender, wanting to whore out the season for maximum audience engagement through any trick in the book. All the other classic characters are either reimagined directly or their traits are split across a few characters, keeping things loyal but fresh at the same time.

The film is a great balance of sad, scary, funny and heartwarming all at once. This one just hits the spot in a way a lot of these other ones don’t. It’s very much the same style of comedy in Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day redone with a festive spin, if you don’t like those then I won’t lie and say you’ll like this. But if you like Bill even a little bit, you’ll find a film with loads of charming moments and quite a moving finale.

Happy Christmas everyone, thanks for reading the Christmas Countdown, let me know if you think I missed any must-watches and maybe I’ll give them a look next year! Tomorrow we are going to do a quick little wrap-up and make a little ranking list of all these films and maybe a few more.