Fred Claus is not likely to end the writer’s strike. And if the writers don’t distance themselves from it, audiences might start picketing the writers during their picketing. Even Santa has become involved: coal for you, Dan Fogelman and Jessie Nelson, Fred’s naughty writers. The concept of Fred Claus is much funnier than the actual film Fred Claus. In it, Santa Claus has a reject brother who almost destroys Christmas. Possibilities on that subject are limitless.
Indeed, the film grasps for better material. In one scene, Fred Claus, played by the motor-mouthed Vince Vaughn, goes to Siblings Anonymous to purge the jealousy and resentment he has for his bro, Ol’ St. Nick. He sits next to a Baldwin, the nutty religious one; Roger Clinton, brother to the former president; and Frank Stallone, who says his life was peachy until Rocky came out. Later, there’s a sequence where Christmas is almost outsourced. To where, though? India? Child sweatshops in Bangladesh? Chinese lead factories? The movie never explains, but the idea was hilarious.
The previous paragraph is all the praise Fred Claus is going to get from me. It’s a sad, sad, sad movie, an even sadder statement on the holiday season, which is reduced to gift-giving and elves doing kung-fu. Oh, and Santa having a snowball fight in a North Pole village set that could have been stolen from the It’s a Small World attraction at Disneyland. And if you’ve ever been on that ride, you know it was made with Popsicle sticks and dollar-store tinsel.
The film begins in something like the 17th Century when a rather large, round baby is born to a rather large, round woman (Kathy Bates). The baby is Nicholas, who will grow up, achieve sainthood and become Father Christmas. Fred — yes, apparently there were Freds in 1654 Holland — is immediately jealous because, after all, how do you upstage a saint? As it turns out though, Santa’s a jerk: he gives away personalized gifts, chops down trees and makes young Fred feel like a real chump. By the time the 21st Century rolls around, Fred’s pretty bitter.
The rest of the plot involves Santa (Paul Giamatti) bailing Fred out of jail and bringing him up to the North Pole to do menial toy tasks in preparation for the holiday season. Santa trusts his bro too much and gives him the job of declaring children naughty or nice, a job that requires sitting behind stacks of “Dear Santa” letters with a rubber stamp. Is Santa dense? Don’t give the big idiot important tasks, unless the plot is too dumb to know better. Fred Claus contains just such a plot. The brotherly bonding is interrupted by an efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey) sent in to watch Santa run Christmas. An unseen executive board, we learn, has demoted the Tooth Fairy, canned the Easter Bunny and has sights set on the Jolly Ol’ Elf, who overspends their already tight budget. With the efficiency expert, Fred’s complacent girlfriend (Rachel Weisz), a horny elf and his leggy crush (Elizabeth Banks), all the baggage of the Claus Family and a miscellaneous tangent with an orphan, Fred Claus has enough plots and characters for five or six mediocre Christmas movies. The fact that they’re all crammed into this one is remarkable in its own special way.
Most bad movies crumble slowly. This one implodes almost immediately and begins sucking life into its void for the remainder. Most of it is shock and awe, Christmas on hyperdrive: A mob of Salvation Army Santas attack Fred, small people use kung-fu to protect the North Pole, a dance sequence interrupts toy making, and an entire scene written around the line, “Don’t bring a snowmobile to a snowball fight.” If your children liked the Tim Allen Santa Clause movies, then this movie will talk down to them in all the right ways. This movie does something very creepy, too. Rather than shrinking human-sized actors down to elf-sized characters, or just using small people, the movie cuts and pastes normal-sized heads onto tiny child-like bodies. The digital effect is never convincing, in fact it’s unsettling and disturbing.
Above everything, though, Fred is just not funny. Vaughn, who’s already become a parody of his better performances, talks too much and about nothing of great importance. Most of the movie is two characters staring at each other waiting for laughs that never come. Giamatti, who will win an Oscar one day soon for something amazing, is too fat and cartoonish for Santa. His fingers, which must be makeup props, are as round sausages and have liver spots — overall, he’s a rather ugly St. Nick. And Rachel Weisz, who didn’t do a third Mummy movie because she wanted to pursue “serious acting,” seems to look into the abyss that is Fred Claus and longs for a corpse wrapped in toilet paper. Fred is clearly trying to capitalize on the quirky comedy Elf, which is a treasure of a holiday picture. Instead it comes off worse than any film from a growing list of terrible Christmas movies that includes Christmas With the Kranks, Surviving Christmas, Deck the Halls, Jingle All the Way and the Santa Clause series, the last of which featured a robot Santa imposter. Elf was innocent, intelligent, charming and sincere in its goofiness. Fred Claus can’t even copy a tenth of its tenderness right.
And it never does capture the true spirit of Christmas, which is where Elf soared. Fred and Santa’s ultimate goal is to get gifts to children. A noble endeavor, but Christmas isn’t just gifts. What about peace, love, charity? Even more un-Christmas-like though: It gives a small cameo to rapper Ludacris, who has made an entire career out the same words that Santa uses — “ho ho ho.”
That’s definitely not the spirit of Christmas and Don Imus would completely agree.
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