Fred Claus (**1/4)

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.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/22/07

The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (*1/2)

? All of the unanswered questions from The Santa Clause 2, and many more, are answered in this completion of the trilogy starring Tim Allen as the North Pole’s tallest resident. With the new Mrs. Claus afflicted by pre-partum depression, or homesickness, the elves work overtime to transform their village into a replica of Canada, lest the visiting in-laws figure out that their daughter’s husband is more than just a toy factory owner. Meanwhile, Jack Frost (Martin Short) schemes to usurp jolly Santa.

+  Martin Short’s haircut looks about right. Alan Arkin and Ann-Margret have a couple of decent moments as the in-laws.

- Where to begin? The story smacks of something the writers came up with up just because someone told them a sequel was needed. The rift Jack Frost instigates between Santa and Mrs. Clause and the in-laws is unconvincing, and the way the “escape clause” works is illogical. As for humor, farting reindeer is about as good as it gets. Listening to Judge Reinhold (as the husband to Santa’s ex) prate on about taking a “feeling inventory” is excruciating, not comical. The robotic way the elves say “Love you Mrs. Claus” in unison has all the warmth of a communist youth rally. Equally charmless is Spencer Breslin as the head elf. And the movie concludes with sap worthy of Mrs. Butterworth.

= *1/2 I actually found the last Santa Clause movie reasonably entertaining, but this bordering-on-dreadful sequel has given me Clause-trophobia. At least, opening just in time for Veteran’s Day, it should be gone before ruining anyone’s real Christmas.

IMDb link