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.
