There’s nothing in Robert Zemeckis’s new production of A Christmas Carol that couldn’t have been shot with live actors and conventional CGI effects.

But Zemeckis continues to hump his beloved mo-cap technology, which replicates the physical performances of specially suited actors as digital avatars within a fully computer-generated landscape – allowing, say, Jim Carrey to play not just Scrooge but all three of the ghosts who visit him on Christmas Eve.

The thing is, the more Zemeckis tries to create photo-realistic characters, the more he exposes the limitations of the tech. The first time Bob Cratchit wandered into frame, I thought someone had stapled Gary Oldman’s face to a hobbit.

As is the case in The Polar Express, Monster House and Beowulf, you get the sense that Zemeckis is making the movie to play with his toy – rather than using the toy to make the movie – and to turn Charles Dickens’s holiday perennial into an expensive, noisy theme-park ride. (Not stimulating enough? See it in IMAX 3-D.)

It’s a tonal mess, leaping jarringly between Dickensian darkness and hyperkinetic action sequences. And despite the attention to fine detail – like the old-man hairs on Scrooge’s nose and the feathering of the Ghost of Christmas Present’s beard – the characters themselves resemble nothing so much as dull-eyed animatronics.Norman Wilner