The Grinch

The Softening of a Scoundrel

At some point, a childhood classic stops being a story and turns into an annual duty. Dr. Seuss’s *How the Grinch Stole Christmas!* crossed that threshold ages ago. The Grinch’s outline is now just part of December, like mall Santas or bad office cookies. We already had the immaculate 1966 Chuck Jones special. We survived Jim Carrey sweating through that 2000 live-action fever dream. So when Illumination—the Minions factory—took another swing in 2018, I braced for something loud and sticky-sweet. What I got was milder than expected, almost weirdly courteous.



Yarrow Cheney and Scott Mosier’s Whoville is easy on the eyes. The whole place looks plush, edible, almost too soft to touch. But that softness is the movie’s problem too. In sanding everything down for contemporary family viewing, the film makes the Grinch less nasty than wounded. He’s not really mean here; he’s lonely. The script even explains his sourness with an orphan backstory and a deprived Christmas childhood, because franchise logic now seems to believe nobody can simply be awful without submitting supporting trauma paperwork.

Take the grocery-store sequence. This should be the scene that introduces his cruelty in earnest. He slinks through the aisles of Whoville messing with shoppers, knocking things just out of reach, trampling their relentless holiday cheer. Yet even there, the malice feels diluted, like a sullen kid acting out without full conviction. His body language gives him away: slumped shoulders, tired eyes, irritation that never sharpens into real contempt. The scene is amusing, but it doesn’t have the mean streak the character needs.



Benedict Cumberbatch is a big reason why. Given his history of playing hyper-verbal snobs and brilliant egotists, you might expect him to make the Grinch deliciously cutting. Instead he goes lighter, even slightly fragile, with that nasal American accent. Max comes off less like an abused sidekick than like a beloved roommate. It’s not a bad performance. It’s just gentler than the role wants. Cath Clarke in *The Guardian* was dead right when she wrote that "more bah-humbuggery... and less zany antics here would have done the job better." The movie keeps sidestepping the fact that the Grinch is supposed to spend most of the story being the worst person in it.



I can’t write it off entirely, though. The Cindy Lou subplot lands a lot better than I expected. Instead of chasing Santa for toys, she wants help for her worn-out single mother Donna, whom Rashida Jones voices with a lovely, tired warmth. That’s a nice little emotional anchor in a movie that otherwise drifts on sugar. Whether that’s enough to justify 85 minutes probably depends on how much patience you have for polished holiday leftovers. It’s easy to watch. I just wish it had a little more bite on the way down.