My wife and I enjoy Charles Dickens' classic tale, A Christmas carol" and like to view the various versions of the story. We came across this offering while scrolling through Amazon Prime and immediately gave it a go. It quickly became apparent that this was a bad decision on our part as the first scene showed that not only did the main actor have no business portraying Scrooge, but the actor has no business "acting." The film is downright amateurish and came across like someone wanted to make a movie and just asked a bunch of friends and whomever wanted to join from the local laundromat and coffee shop. The sets did not remotely look like something from 1842 but whatever the local church had around. The acting was downright painful and my wife and I just kept looking at each other in disbelief at how bad this thing turned out to be.
I then looked it up on IMDb and found out that the director also cast himself in the choice role as Scrooge. Turns out this guy has made several other "adaptions" and cast himself in the lead roles in each one. How much of an ego can one person have to put their own self indulgence ahead of what would be best for a movie project. More so, how delusional can one be to not realize that they lack the acting chops to pull off the role. This guy makes Uwe Boll come across like Cecil B DeMille.
What astounds me is that this movie even rates as 4 stars. The director must have had everyone one at the coffee shop go on here and rate it as high as possible. Beware, this is not close to a 4 star film. Finer things have been flushed down the toilet. In closing, to reference the actual story, where Marley actually HAS the chains of his sins weighing him down, Director Anthony Mann should be wrapped in an ocean liner anchor chain for this crime against cinema for the rest of his days and beyond.
