Film Review - The Grinch (2018)

The Grinch is based off of the Grinch who Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the voice of the Grinch who every year sees the people of Whoville do many Christmas celebrations and he gets so sick of it that he decides he’s going to steal their Christmas.

I was very very excited as I am a bit of a Christmas Grinch and the trailers for this movie had me thinking that if this movie could deliver the goods it would be my Christmas movie and well it does deliver and it doesn’t.

Firstly Benedict is great as the Grinch and he is clearly having a lot of fun voicing the role many of the laughs I had from watching the film also centre on him but away from him and his dog Max and his scheme to steal Christmas is where the film fell over for me.

The whole Whoville scene with the over the top Christmas decorations did very little for me after a while and there’s a cute little girl called Cindy Lou who wants to help her overworked mum voiced by Rashida Jones and it feels like a lot of that stuff was added to this movie version to make it a proper feature film as both the original Dr. Seuss book and the 1966 animated adaptation aren’t very long in fact the 1966 film is more of a special running 25-30 minutes and I feel that would’ve been better.

And lastly there is a voiceover narration that really got on my nerves after a while and rarely do I find that that kind of narration rarely ever works as all it does is just tell the audience what’s going on when it would be far better and I think this movie would’ve been much better if we got to discover that information for ourselves that way we can build a connection to the character instead we get this leaden voiceover that makes Dr. Seuss’s writing sound like an alien language.

Now the Grinch isn’t bad and I certainly had fun with it but it was also a bit of a disappointment for me in being merely fine but I think these Dr. Seuss adaptations are Illumination’s weakest point in their studio their own stuff like Secret Life of Pets and Despicable Me are much better, 3 out of 5.