Metacritic reviews

As Scrooge, Michael Caine rises to the challenge and helps find the pathos beneath the puppetry.

The Muppet Christmas Carol's warmth, wit and obvious affection for Dickens make it one of the greatest Christmas films – and literary adaptations – of all time.

The Muppet Christmas Carol may be the most important Dickens adaptation of our time.

Vastly enjoyable despite the syrupy, soppy song bit in the middle (go make a glass of mulled wine during it). Michael Caine is perfect in the role and there are many genuine belly laughs.

The three ghosts of Christmas are wonderful. Elsewhere, Fozzie Bear bears a resemblance to Francis L Sullivan in the David Lean Dickens adaptations, and there's a shop called Micklewhite. As an actor, Kermit can corrugate his forehead vertically. Good fun.

Will kids like the movie? The kids around me in the theater seemed to, although more for the Muppets than for the cautionary tale of Scrooge.

There's no great show of wit or tunefulness here, and the ingenious cross-generational touches are fairly rare. But there is a lively kiddie version of the Dickens tale, one that very young viewers ought to understand.

Although The Muppet Christmas Carol doesn’t really work as an adaptation of the beloved Dickens novel or as a Muppet movie, it nevertheless works on its own terms for a niche audience. It’s the kind of high concept family film that can be carted out every Christmas season and enjoyed in the same way as “Frosty the Snowman”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, or “The Year without a Santa Claus.”

A mixed bag of mixed moods. The somberness of Dickens's oft-filmed seasonal cautionary fable works at cross purposes with the Muppets, keeping their usual gentle anarchy at bay.

This is the dullest and least successful adaptation of the Christmas chestnut I've ever seen, possibly because the mixture of Muppets and humans creates anomalies of scale and degrees of stylized behavior that the film tries to ignore rather than work with.