Bill Murray is a very good actor, if you can stand him.  His comedy, like his personality seems to be, is very dry and sarcastic, and that can rub a lot of people the wrong way.  Even if you don’t love his comedy, movies like Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, and Lost in Translation are great showcases of his acting talent.  Lost in Translation proves that he isn’t just a comedic actor, but a good actor of drama, but like most, he needs a funny script to make his material entertaining.  Unfortunately, this movie does not use Murray to the extent that most films do.

Scrooged follows the same basic plot of the classic Dickens story, in a more modern day setting.  A man named Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is a TV executive, who gets caught up in the commercialistic nature of the holiday season.  He had a terrible childhood, and doesn’t appreciate the true values of the season like he should, and is thus visited by three ghosts.  They, like the originals, try to teach him the value of the holidays.  The problems arise when the film tries to be diverge from the classic story.

Now, if you’re going to do any sort of adaptation of anything, there have to be some changes made to make your film stand out and be its own.  This movie attempts to litter the classic tale with dark humor, it an attempt to make the movie fresh and adult-friendly.  It would make sense, to fit the style of Bill Murray, but it doesn’t.  Murray is generally funny, and I am not opposed to dark humor, but he is given nothing to work within the script.  It seems like the movie was written around the fact that Murray would be in it, in the hopes that it would be funny because of him.  That isn’t how it works; actors enhance good scripts, not create them.  Some parts, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, are so annoying that it hurts to watch them.

There’s not much reason to watch this movie, even if you’re a big fan of Murray.  His characters eventual change to be good seems out of nowhere, and there is no middle to his transformation.  He goes from  complete jerk to really nice guy instantly.  Stick to the other versions of the tale.