When you see Santa Claus, did you ever wonder what it would be like to be his never-good-enough older brother? No, of course you didn’t. But someone else did, and the result is this intermittently funny, rarely heartwarming comedy starring Vince Vaughn as the title character.
Reunited with his Clay Pigeons and Wedding Crashers director, David Dobkin, Vaughn departs not much from his usual comic persona, a well-meaning, loquaciously self-absorbed guy who likes to have a good time. For just a bit, the movie seemed like it was going to be a funny, cynical take on the holiday, like Wedding Crashers translated into a Christmas movie. A short prologue, set in some mythical past, finds Fred resenting his do-gooder brother, who gets all the attention from Mom (Kathy Bates). Skip ahead a bunch of centuries and we find Fred getting chased by a bunch of Santas for running a fake charity scam on the streets of Chicago and steering clear of the North Pole until, of course, he can’t avoid it. For his part, Paul Giamatti’s Santa is a decent guy, but compared to him even Tim Allen seems larger than life. A numbers cruncher (Kevin Spacey) is also spending the season in the Arctic, threatening to shut the whole place down if things don’t get more efficient. (They’re still reviewing the naughty/nice list on paper, if you can imagine.) What exactly will be done with the place if it closes is never specified, but there is potential satire in a story about a chubby guy who purports to visit every Christian home in one night and stuffs himself down chimneys. Some jokes are tossed the way of adults, one implying that Santa suffers from erectile dysfunction. Fred, sick of hearing the same Christmas song, overpowers the North Pole deejay (Ludacris, who is, ludicrously, the only black elf I noticed) and gets all the elves to dance to the remix of Elvis’s “Rubberneckin’.”
But at other times someone remembered that the movie is supposed to be a family movie, and the story winds up where it should, albeit in a vaguely unsatisfying way. Some elfin humor and minor sight gags should just barely satisfy the younger set, but the movie feels like a slapped-together attempt to satisfy everybody that makes the North Pole seem like a pretty dull place. Allen’s Santa Clause movies have really mined the Santa-as-regular-guy theme adequately (and beyond, if you’ve seen the cruddy third entry). Someone really needs to start making Santa and his homeland feel truly magical again or I will lose the last vestige of Christmas envy this raised-Jewish kid ever had.
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