Movie Review - 'A Christmas Carol' looks great in 3-D

Robert Zemeckis hits a few flat notes as he takes on Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," using the same motion-capture technology from his adaptation of "The Polar Express."Much of the story looks great, dark and brooding. It's scary when it needs to be, grotesque when required. And it doesn't dumb down the dialogue or go for modern snarky jokes; instead it uses many of Dickens' actual words, that embroidered language that will go over the heads of little ones (but to which they still should be exposed).

Still, despite the obvious care given the story, at its heart it is a dry lump of coal. This "Christmas Carol" is curiously remote and cold - it may wow you with its visuals (particularly if seen in 3-D), but it likely won't mess with your emotions.

This time around, the transformation of the misanthropic Scrooge has little appeal: It never seems in doubt, and doesn't seem that earth-shattering when it happens. Much of that has to do with that motion-capture technology. As whiz-bang as it is, it can't get the human face right; they're waxy, plastic, cartoonish, without the spark of real life.

I would rather have seen the real Jim Carrey as Scrooge (and the three ghosts), the real Gary Oldman as Bob Crachit, and a real smudged-face kid playing Tiny Tim.

"The Polar Express" worked far better as a Christmas story, seeing how it captured the dreamlike state of that tale.

"A Christmas Carol?" It needs to be grittier, grounded in the grime of Victorian London. The motion-capture tricks smooth too much of that out - it looks more like a theme park populated by mannequins.

Don't shortchange the craft of Zemeckis and co., though. It looks great, in 3-D, when the snowflakes start falling around you. And several of the movie's showy sequences are stunning and playful, especially an early one in which we swoop up and down the streets of the city.

Just as he did in "The Polar Express," though, Zemeckis eventually overdoes the roller-coaster action stuff. That's particularly evident in one drawn-out chase sequence in which Scrooge gets turned into an itty-bitty creature for reasons, I admit, that seemed rather arbitrary to me.