On the outskirts of Whoville lives a green, revenge-seeking Grinch who plans to ruin Christmas for all the town’s citizens.
Jim Carrey’s take on Dr. Seuss’s classic in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” is the sort of cinematic sugar rush that leaves you both wired and strangely unsatisfied. At the center is Carrey himself, whose relentlessly physical performance as the iconic Christmas thief is either inspired or exhausting, depending on your tolerance for cartoonish antics. He throws himself into the role with a kind of elastic, maniacal energy that’s honestly mesmerizing—he’s green, he’s mean, and if nothing else, you can’t look away.
Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning makeup job on Carrey deserves the standing ovation it gets every holiday season. The transformation from rubber-faced comedian to furry green misanthrope is nothing short of spectacular. And you can’t talk about this version of Whoville without crediting the set designers, who go for broke with a wild, Day-Glo fever dream. The swirling colors and carnival-like sets lend the film a texture that’s hard to forget, even if you’d like to.
Humor-wise, the film delivers plenty of slapstick for the kids, but there’s also a stream of adult-aimed jokes that fly well over tiny heads. Carrey cracks wise about jury duty, yells “hate, hate, double hate!” while rifling through the phone book, and serves up enough winks to keep the grown-ups in on the joke. At its best, these moments bring a kind of giddy, subversive fun that can catch you off guard—just not always in a way that feels true to Seuss.
That’s really where the Grinch’s problems begin. For every clever gag, there’s a sense that the movie is working overtime to justify its existence—piling on extra storylines, a tragic backstory for the Grinch, and a whole side plot for Cindy Lou Who (played earnestly by Taylor Momsen) that drags out what was originally a perfectly contained 26-minute TV special. The extra runtime is padded with new characters, detours, and comic business that mostly distract from the simple, tight heart of the original.
Many find Carrey’s manic style “coarse” and over-the-top, draining the story of its subtle charm. The hyperactive direction and endlessly zany performances can feel more exhausting than enchanting, as if the filmmakers worried that any moment of quiet would cause kids to flee the theater. The result is a sometimes dull, noisy affair that starts to feel weighed down by its own frenetic energy, making it weirdly lacking in imagination for a movie that’s so visually wild.
Bottom line: Carrey’s Grinch is unforgettable, defiantly weird, and sometimes legitimately funny, and Baker’s makeup and Whoville’s set design are visual feasts. But the heart of Dr. Seuss’s story gets a little lost in the shuffle, buried under layers of plot and green fur. Sometimes, less really is more.
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