"Bah! Humbug!"

To coin a phrase.

I understand why Jim Carrey wanted to do Robert Zemeckis' lavish new computer graphic extravaganza on the much-filmed (at least 56 times, according to Google) and classic tale by Charles Dickens.

Actors always want to "do" Scrooge. If, for instance, you were George C. Scott and someone dangled Dickens under your aging nose, you'd bite in a flash. And so he did.

"A Christmas Carol"

Three stars

The voices of Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Fionnula Flanagan and Bob Hoskins in Robert Zemeckis' lavish computer graphic version of the much-filmed Charles Dickens tale of the world's most sour skinflint at Christmas. Rated PG for some mild scares.

Comedians are particularly susceptible to Scrooge-envy (among the least justifiable Scrooge incarnations in cinematic history was surely Bill Murray, who turned him into a modern TV exec in "Scrooged").

Carrey is surprisingly good, but mainly because he and Zemeckis pay adequate tribute to the elephant in the room: that however often the tale has been made and animated at the movies or on television there IS only one Ebenezer Scrooge on screens -- Alastair Sim in 1951, one of the great performances in the entire history of film, and a shoo-in for almost anyone's Top 20.

The film's process here is called "performance capture," which combines live action and computer animation that's filled in later. All of which is lovely but as the process has evolved it still hasn't solved the problem of what to do about human eyes. More than half the time you're looking at faces that seem to have doll's eyes and it's nothing if not disconcerting -- not to mention appalling to the characters involved (should Bob Cratchit's eyes look as if they were created by Hasbro or Mattel? Tiny Tim's?)

When trouble is taken -- as it often was with Carrey's Scrooge in the movie -- Zemeckis can get away with it but otherwise, all those dead eyes are just too creepy to deal with.

Where I can't help emitting a solid "Bah, humbug" is in this: giving the real Jim Carrey a computer-generated face is like slapping prosthetic feet on a cinematic Fred Astaire or giving a bionic arm to Bret Favre. You're taking away his greatest asset. As a voice actor, Carrey, as Scrooge, is surprisingly splendid -- especially, when, at the end with Scrooge's final dance of conversion to Christmas-worship, both he and his director are paying clear-cut tribute to Sim in one of the greatest scenes in movie history. But it's Carrey's virtuosically plastic face and gloriously nuclear ego that got him where he is. Both are sorely missed in all the facial deadness and human absence of Zemeckis' "A Christmas Carol."

In general, the movie is visually majestic, dramatically inert and emotionally stunted.

I must say, though, that for all the human emptiness, Zemeckis and CGI marry thrillingly in so many ways. Zemeckis is an authentically great filmmaker in terms of technique ("Forrest Gump," "What Lies Beneath," "Cast Away"). What he does with computer animation here are all those things that he'd find physically impossible with an ordinary camera but which any filmmaker would love to be able to do -- a steadicam crane shot, for instance, that can fly at top speed through blocks of city streets, around corners, in and out of buildings.

Visuals, then, are the whole point of this "Christmas Carol." And they're worth seeing.

Scrooge is still the same old Scrooge we all scorn reflexively and sentimentally, a monstrous skinflint who would, quite literally, steal the pennies from a dead man's eyes ("tuppence is tuppence"). He's a man who scorns all human contact, much less elementary human charity and compassion. It is Carrey channeling Sim in his voice who does that surprisingly well.

Double and triple duty is done by most of the voice actors here -- Carrey as Scrooge at all ages AND all the spirits too, Gary Oldman as Bob

Cratchit, Jacob Marley AND Tiny Tim, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright Penn, Bob Hoskins. Only Colin Firth, as Scrooge's nephew Fred, and Fionnula Flanagan as Scrooge's ghoulish housekeeper Mrs. Dilbert get away with one voice on this soundtrack.

To be fair, the visuals make it that rare "Christmas Carol" in the vast, heaving sea of cinematic "Christmas Carols" that actually earns its keep, rather than rides pathetically on the shoulders of Dickens and/or Alastair Sim.

Scrooge, that great cosmic bookkeeper, would, no doubt, have it no other way.