This movie is a mess.
For awhile, it’s an entertaining mess. Scripters Chris Morgan and Hiram Garcia have fun blending numerous Christmas/Santa Claus myths, and their concept of the high-tech North Pole operation is a golly-gee-willikers smile. Production designer Bill Brzeski clearly went to town, and the visual effects folks do marvelous things with elves and Santa’s awesomely huge reindeer.
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| Having successfully filled in as a mall Santa for a day, the actual Mr. Claus (J.K. Simmons, right) is escorted back to his reindeer-drivn sleigh by security chief Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson). |
I also was willing to roll with a plot line that involves Santa being kidnapped by the evil Christmas Witch, aka Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), to prevent him from making the rounds on the all-important night, while replacing his gift-giving with her own nefarious scheme.
But by about this point, the script’s disparate elements begin to burst at the seams.
Backing up a bit, the first act establishes the longstanding bond between Santa and his head of security: Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), commander of the North Pole’s E.L.F. team (Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification). After centuries of faithful service, Callum has grown disenchanted with humanity’s rising willingness to behave badly — without concern — thus winding up on the Naughty List.
Santa, being Santa, has faith.
“Every decision,” he insists, in Simmons’ best, wise-guidance tone, “is an opportunity to do the right thing.”
Elsewhere, chronic gambler and expert “fixer” Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) has helped an unknown party track an unusual seismic disturbance ... not realizing that it’s Santa’s reindeer taking off, after his shopping mall gig. Said unknown party turns out to be Gryla; Jack has unwittingly given her the means to find the concealed North Pole, and orchestrate the aforementioned kidnapping.
This absolutely horrifies Zoe (Lucy Liu), head of the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority (M.O.R.A.), an umbrella organization charged with protecting and defending the mythological world, from Bigfoot to the Easter Bunny. Santa’s absence, with only one day before Christmas, is a crisis of the highest magnitude.
Callum and his team quickly locate and enlist Jack, to help them recover Santa: a mission initially pooh-poohed by the skeptical mortal. (We briefly see his kid version in this film’s prologue, played by Wyatt Hunt, as a precocious disbeliever in Santa.) A brief encounter with Cal’s second-in-command, Garcia — a massive talking polar bear — soon sets that straight.
Jack tracks his initial contact to Aruba, at which point this film earns its PG-13 rating, and ceases to be a family-friendly comedy. Said contact turns out to be a notorious smuggler surrounded by a bevy of all-but-naked babes in thongs and teeny bikinis; one suspects they were paid according to the exposed square inches of butt cheeks.
Matters then go from bad to worse.
Cal and Jack’s next stop is the ominous castle home of Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), Santa’s long-estranged brother: a massive, horned and spike-tailed monster once responsible for punishing folks on the Naughty List.
What follows, given that our heroes have arrived amid the monster’s monthlong Krampusnacht party, is the very definition of jumping the shark: an interminable sequence that involves — I’m not making this up — a cheek-slapping contest between Cal and Krampus.
Seriously ... is this supposed to be some daft reference to Will Smith’s Oscar night assault?
Krampus is surrounded by sybaritic acolytes who appear to have escaped from a local S&M dungeon, and who further trash this film’s supposed family-friendly values.
The rest is a downhill slide to the inevitable confrontation with Gryla, with added sloppy sentimentality generated by a late-entry subplot involving Jack’s failure to be a better father to neglected adolescent son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel). Like, this couldn’t have been better established sooner?
It’s a shame, because there’s much to admire here. Krampus is a genuine creature of Central and Eastern Alpine folkloric tradition, who accompanies Saint Nicholas during visits to children, and punishes the ill-behaved with birch rods. (Gryla appears to be wholly made up.) Cal’s size-shifting gadget constantly is put to clever use, and his means of instant transportation — via toy store storage closets — is a smile.
A battle with Gryla’s three massive, menacing snowmen is well staged, as is the North Pole climax. Johnson and Evans handle their odd-couple banter reasonably well, and — let’s face it — Johnson remains an engaging force of nature all by himself.
But the multiplying pieces appear to come from at least three different jigsaw puzzles, and they fail to fit together. Ultimately, this film doesn’t know what it wants to be: kid-oriented holiday fantasy, or adult-oriented action comedy.
And, thus, it fails at both.
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