Spirited (2022)

Apple TV+ spent a reported $75 million on Spirited, a musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring two of the most expensive comedians in Hollywood. That sentence alone tells you something about the state of Christmas movies in 2022: studios were willing to bet blockbuster money on Dickens, provided you added tap dancing and Ryan Reynolds' deadpan snark. The gamble mostly pays off.

Spirited flips the classic premise by making the ghosts the protagonists. Will Ferrell plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, a bureaucratic middle manager in a vast afterlife operation that reforms one terrible person every Christmas Eve. His target this year is Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), a media consultant who weaponizes social media outrage for profit. The twist is that Clint might be "unredeemable," a category the ghost department hasn't dealt with before.

A Christmas Carol Played as a Buddy Comedy

The best decision director Sean Anders made was treating the Ghost of Christmas Present as a character with his own arc. Ferrell's ghost is tired, insecure, and quietly haunted by his own living past. He's been doing this job for centuries and has never confronted the question of his own redemption. That gives the movie a structural spine most Christmas Carol adaptations lack: two parallel stories of transformation rather than one.

Reynolds does exactly what you'd expect, which is both the movie's strength and its ceiling. His Clint Briggs is a sharper version of his usual persona, a guy who sees through every manipulation because manipulation is his profession. The script, co-written by Anders and John Morris, is smart enough to make Clint's cynicism genuinely threatening rather than charming. When he starts reverse-engineering his own haunting, dissecting the ghost playbook in real time, the movie finds its best material.

Octavia Spencer plays Clint's business partner Kimberly, who gets her own redemption thread. Spencer brings gravity to a role that could have been a footnote, and her scenes ground the movie when the comedy threatens to float away entirely.

The Musical Numbers in Spirited Actually Work

Here's the surprise: the songs are good. Not "good for a comedy" good. Actually good. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the team behind The Greatest Showman and La La Land, wrote the score. "Good Afternoon" is a full production number with 50+ dancers on the streets of a fictional city, and both Ferrell and Reynolds committed to the choreography. Ferrell in particular sells it. The man spent weeks training with choreographer Chloe Arnold, and his earnestness in the dance sequences is genuinely disarming.

"That Christmas Morning Feelin'" serves as the movie's emotional anchor, recurring at key moments with shifting context. It's catchy without being cloying, which is harder to pull off than it sounds in a Christmas musical.

The weakest number is probably "The View From Here," which stalls the pacing in the second act. But even the weaker songs look polished. The production design on the musical sequences is lavish, full of period costumes and elaborate sets that the $75 million budget clearly funded.

Where Spirited Stumbles

The movie is too long at 127 minutes. A musical comedy retelling of A Christmas Carol has no business running over two hours, and you feel every extra minute in the back half. The "unredeemable" subplot introduces stakes that the movie doesn't quite know how to resolve, settling for an ending that's sweet but logically wobbly.

There's also a tension between the movie's satirical edge and its sentimental heart. The first hour sharpens its teeth on social media culture, corporate manipulation, and the performative nature of modern outrage. Then it has to pivot into sincerity, and the transition is bumpy. You can feel the screenplay negotiating between "Ryan Reynolds quip machine" and "genuine emotional transformation," and it doesn't always find the balance.

The supporting cast beyond Spencer gets thin material. Sunita Mani plays the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and barely gets to register before the third act rushes to its conclusion.

Spirited Cast and Performances

Ferrell is the reason to watch. He underplays beautifully, which sounds strange for a man known for screaming in his underwear, but his restraint gives the movie its emotional center. There's a scene where his ghost watches footage of his own living past, and Ferrell plays it with a quiet sadness that Reynolds' flashier performance can't match.

Reynolds is Reynolds. If you find his shtick tiresome, this won't convert you. If you enjoy it, you'll get a refined version of it. The script gives him slightly better material than most of his vehicles, and he rises to it without ever fully disappearing into the role.

The real scene-stealer might be Tracy Morgan in a small role as a reformed Scrooge from a past Christmas Eve, now working as a volunteer in the ghost operation. He gets two scenes and makes both count.

Is Spirited a Good Christmas Movie?

It's a good movie that happens to be thoroughly, unapologetically Christmas. The Dickens framework isn't a gimmick here. The filmmakers clearly love A Christmas Carol and built their comedy on top of that love rather than in spite of it. The ghost bureaucracy is clever world-building, the musical numbers are legitimate, and the central friendship between Ferrell and Reynolds generates real warmth by the final act.

At seven out of ten, it lands in the tier of Christmas movies you're genuinely happy to revisit, not a new classic, but a solid addition to the rotation. The last image before the credits is Ferrell's ghost, finally at peace, walking through falling snow in a Victorian London street that fades into the modern city. It's a nice touch. Pasek and Paul's score swells underneath. You'll hum it on the way to the kitchen for leftover cookies.