What if Santa Claus had a brother, and that brother was Vince Vaughn? That’s the premise behind Fred Claus, and it’s just as thin as Santa’s latex-covered hands are thick. Santa is played by Oscar nominee Giamatti with all the originality and charm of your standard Macy’s St. Nick stand-in, and Fred Claus may as well have been named Vince Claus since Vaughn never deviates from his rapid-fire, heavily improvised schtick.
The problem is that for all of Vaughn’s fast-paced babbling, nothing winds up being very funny. In an attempt to compensate, the film struggles to find something else to be about, but every subplot is so random and poorly thought-out, it just leaves us scratching our heads. So we get some overly precocious, inner-city kid whom the self-centered Fred tolerates only so he can give him bad life advice in order to recant later on. We get Santa’s head elf learning to dance in order to impress the local blond bombshell, who inexplicably is the only non-elf living at the North Pole other than Mr. and Mrs. Claus (I wonder how Mrs. Claus feels about that). We get Kevin Spacey showing up as the corporate villain, who has the evil agenda of shutting Santa down. Yes, somehow Santa’s philanthropic operation is run like a publicly traded corporation with a board of executives capable of removing the jolly company founder from power.
This convoluted mess is presented as a fairy tale and consistently invents bizarre new rules just to make itself and its plot contrivances possible. Turns out that when you become a saint, not only do you become immortal, but your entire nuclear family does as well. This is especially handy if you deliver presents every Christmas because for some arbitrary reason, only a family member can operate Santa’s sleigh. And since this is yet another movie in which the underdog invariably has to save our favorite consumerist holiday at the end, you know that little regulation is going to come in handy.
There’s one inspired scene in the film, in which Fred attends a support group for brothers trapped in the shadows of their famous siblings. The cameos are priceless. But all the other gags are ripped off from existing Christmas movies. Fred’s attempts to cram himself into the diminutive environment of the elves was funnier when Will Ferrell did it in Elf. And Fred’s battle with multiple costumed Santas was done better in Jingle All the Way. That’s right. Jingle All the Way ... is better.
Fred Claus
*
Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti, John Michael Higgins
Directed by David Dobkin
Rated PG
Opens Friday