Ebenezer review – Johnny Depp’s Scrooge tries to exorcise ghosts of business past

The latest film version of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol is decent enough, though its star is rather better as the legendary miser before redemption arrives Here for lovers of Dickens – and fans of subtext – is an unexpectedly watchable new movie version of A Christmas Carol starring a top-hatted and heavily madeup Johnny Depp; it is a film about whether it’s possible for a man to earn redemption before it is too late. (The answer is … sure, as long as you say sorry and change your ways.

But Mr Scrooge never launched a libel action against the Sun for calling him an un-Christmassy old meanie.) In fact, screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern and director Ti West have put together a perfectly serviceable, faithful adaptation – a tradaptation, if you will – of Dickens’s masterpiece about the hideous old miser saved from damnation on Christmas Eve by the appearance of three Christmas ghosts, from yuletides past, present and future.

It sticks to the accepted narrative beats and more or less all the familiar episodes, but with a few twists. Continue reading...