by Travis Johnson
Worth: $2.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Johnny Depp, Sir Ian McKellen, Rupert Grint, Sam Claflin, Daisy Ridley, Tramell Tillman
Intro:
… lazy, derivative, and shallow …
Well, here comes Johnny Depp again, having spent the best part of a decade in the wilderness following his exceedingly messy divorce from Amber Heard and a series of legal battles that ultimately saw his labelling as a wife beater found “substantially true” in a UK court.
Normally, an actor’s personal problems shouldn’t figure into a review, but Ebenezer invites the inclusion. It is, after all, an adaptation of perhaps the most famous redemption story in the English language, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And it’s also the first major push in Depp’s redemption tour; if nothing else, it’s his highest profile role in a while. At one point, Depp, slate-faced and charmless as archetypal miser Ebenezer Scrooge, stares down the barrel of the camera and asks the audience to consider if a man like him is worthy of a second shot. It’s all a bit on the nose.
And that’s about all it is; there’s nothing to recommend here apart from the car crash spectacle of Depp trying to slip back into Hollywood’s good graces in a role that could, we suppose, be read as self-effacing if you were in a particularly generous mood. Less charitably – and more accurately – it comes across as both smug and low effort, with Depp, all top hat and scowl, playing Scrooge in one grumpy register for the entire running time until the third act come-to-Jesus moment. If Ebenezer is supposed to be a showcase for Depp’s character acting chops, reminding us that before he was Captain Jack Sparrow, he offered us an impressive array of wonderful weirdos, it’s a big miss.
The rest of the cast do better in roles that are rendered flat and uninteresting by screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern’s too-faithful adaptation. Scrooge’s doomed partner Jacob Marley has life – even in death – solely because he’s played by Sir Ian McKellen. The same can be said for Rupert Grint’s Bob Cratchitt, with the former Harry Potter kid tasked with projecting “put-upon but plucky” for the whole of his screentime. Sam Claflin and Daisy Ridley do what they can with the roles of Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, and his wife, Clara, which isn’t much. The best that can be said is that their work here is a credit to their professionalism; certainly, director Ti West isn’t interested in drawing more complex performances out of them.
Which is disappointing, because West is normally a director worth watching. Known for his horror work, with such films as The House of the Devil and his porno-horror X trilogy, West’s work is normally lo-fi and nostalgia-tinged, evoking the VHS nasties of the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s hard to see what in his prior body of work led to him directing Ebenezer, nor what he brings to the project apart from a slightly sharper focus on the horrific elements of Dickens’ ghost story. Even there, one of the most striking special effects gags was done earlier and better in Richard Donner’s Scrooged, so what are we even doing here? A question that you may well ask yourself more than once should you decide to give Ebenezer its day in court.
There are still Johnny Depp fans in the wild who’ll eat this thing up with enthusiasm, of course, and they’re welcome to it. But even pushing Death of the Author past breaking point, Ebenezer is such a lazy, derivative, and shallow offering that the only reason to watch it is the Johnny Depp of it all. There’s simply nothing else there, and that’s not enough.
