There's a thin line between a heartwarming holiday movie and a heartrendingly bad Christmas film. TIME's Richard Corliss sets his sights on the latter.
Economic crisis at the North Pole! Santa’s workshop seeks congressional bailout! Not quite, but, just before Christmas, Mr. Claus (Paul Giamatti) seems as stressed as a GM exec. Enter an improbable savior, Santa’s envious, underachieving brother Fred (Vince Vaughn). You might have expected smart seasonal comedy reunited with his Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin, but Fred Claus betrayed those hopes. The shaggy energy that usually makes Vaughn so appealing — he’s a louche cannon — is hardly evident. The actor has to be surly, then sanctified, and neither plays to his strengths. Will Ferrell could be a cute-innocent outsider in Elf; here, Vaughn just looks snowed under. We’re exempting Vaughn’s 2008 hit, the strident Four Christmases, but only because we have a rule that no star can be in more than one of our worsts.
Preston Sturges made a movie called Christmas in July, and Rankin and Bass exploited their Noel properties with Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July. But it took David Zucker, enraged over the American left’s opposition to President Bush’s Iraq excursion, to hijack Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and set it in the U.S. on the Fourth of July. His Scrooge is a Michael Moore clone (played by the late Chris Farley’s brother Kevin) who wants to abolish Independence Day; he is visited by the remonstrating ghosts of JFK, Patton, Washington and, huh?, Trace Adkins. Zucker, part of the team that created Airplane! and the Naked Gun series, knows his comedy; he’s tucked a dozen or so good gags into his anti-liberal screed. Also, no question, the left could stand some puncturing of its pomposity. But the mean spirit of Zucker’s satire hardly jibes with the liberal spirits of the original tale. I say, “Bah! Humbug!” to him, and “Oh, joy! Rapture!” to a real Dickens of a Christmas movie, the 1951 Alistair Sim Scrooge, a.k.a. A Christmas Carol. See, I do like Christmas movies. The good ones.
