Sean Anders ("Daddy's Home") Co-wrote and directed this acknowledged clever variation on a story told by everyone from the Muppets to Bill Murray, but that's a different kind of miser's tale. What if the ghosts who haunted Ebenezer the Scrooge on that fateful night did the same thing every year to a different troubled soul? “Spirited” imagines an entire spiritual industry built to make up for a relentless jerk — and yes, you get into the idea that so much energy spent on one person in the age of successful social media jobs manipulating thousands is like dropping a bucket. Still, facilitator Jacob Marley (Patrick Page) believes there is value in their operation, and leads a huge team that searches each year for the chosen miser.
The team thinks they have a perfect option in a Vancouver hotel manager yelling at the cleaners, but the ghost of a Christmas gift (Will FerrellHe met a speaker at the hotel named Clint Briggs.Ryan Reynolds), realizing it is the white whale. Briggs is a social media manipulator who made a song—yes, that's a lively musical—about weaponizing the war at Christmas for profit. He's the kind of businessman who doesn't see moral lines as long as his client wins, even if the client is his niece, Wren (Marlowe Barclay), who persuaded him to conduct dissenting research and expose on social media her competitor for a position at the school. Clint Kimberly Assistant (Octavia SpencerShe appears exhausted by her boss's moral failings, but Clint doesn't see herself as a force for evil. He's just one of those guys who believes hitting first is the best strategy. (A minor flaw in the film as the writers seem unwilling to make Clint "unrecoverable" and risk alienating viewers with one of their beloved gadgets.)
Ferrell's ghost becomes obsessed with recovering Clint, even like other spirits (Sunita Mane plays the past and Tracy Morgan Voices yet to come) are basically marginalized. Surprisingly enough, "Zest" becomes as much a Christmas present ghost tale as Clint's tale, as Ferrell's character wants to leave everything behind and become human again, especially after an unexpected reason is found to join the deadly dossier.
All of this is told by the hyperactive energy of what sometimes seems like a draft of a musical theater in terms of function and form. Musical numbers explode with choirs of backup singers/dancers playing on one side of a group as if they were on stage. The feeling that you're watching a music video extends to the production design, which often looks like cheap sets or green screen wallpapers rather than actual physical spaces. And the writing has this Broadway tendency to hit a few of the same tunes over and over again, especially in the film's final works, which pushed this long music over two hours.
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