Michael's Movie Grade: B+
A real yuletide treat with all the R-rated violence to fill your heart with Christmas joy.
This movie may be simply dumb fun, but it is just the kind of dumb fun that I love. Though admittedly it takes this movie a little bit to get going, once it gets going it is simply delightful. For those of you who don't know the basic plot of this movie, Santa Claus beats the heck out of some bad guys to help protect a little girl who believes in him. The violence here is not for the squeamish, but that is just what will endear this film to many others. What makes it work so well for me is the over-the-top cartoony-ness to all this violence and the fact that there is a wonderfully dark sense of humor to much of the action here. The filmmakers know just why someone will go to see a movie with this plot and so they just have a lot of fun with the action scenes and if you see this film in a theater, you will see just how well this pays off. The most violent and bloody moments are the ones where you will hear the most laughter and that is just the way it should be. This especially pays off during a scene that is the best Home Alone homage you will ever see. If you see this movie, you will recognize this scene immediately. Yet beneath all this R-rated violence and dark humor, this movie has a surprisingly warm heart. This film is really about Santa Claus becoming cynical and forgetting why he became Santa in the first place, until he meets a little girl who believes in him and the spirit of Christmas. This could have made for a really charming family film, if that is what the filmmakers wanted to make. Even if this is not that family film, it still has a few moments that make you feel warm inside between the blood and guts. One might say that this is an R rated Christmas film with the heart of a G rated Christmas film. Holding this all together is a wonderful performance by David Harbour as Santa Claus. He somehow manages to feel like both an action hero and the real Santa.
My biggest complaint about this movie is the villains. They are simply not as memorable or fun as they should be. They are simply generic villains. Even the humor revolving around their characters often falls flat. There are also some story points that do feel quite rushed (dang it, I want a full feature length movie about this Santa's backstory).
This may not be a movie for everyone, but if you are the type of person a film like this would appeal to (which I apparently am), you are in for a lot of fun.
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