There really isn’t too much about Fred Claus that you haven’t seen in countless other holiday films. Especially in movies about good old Saint Nicholas (or Santa Claus as he is also known as). The plots always involve some malarkey going on at the factory that may or may not prevent him from delivering all of the necessary toys to the children of the world. Fred Claus is no different. While it tries to bring a new premise into the mix (Santa Claus has a cranky older brother), the result is just as humorless and stale as the Tim Allen’s The Santa Clause trilogy.
Fred Claus (Vince Vaughn) is your average everyday man with one exception – his brother is Santa Claus. The two have a rather rocky history, as Nicholas’ charitable spirit always grabbed the attention of their parents, so Fred avoids his family and spends his time working as a repo man. After involving himself in a rather questionable moneymaking scheme (he fakes being a charity organization and peddles money), he is arrested. Who can he turn to for help? You guessed it.
But Santa Claus (Paul Giamatti) has quite a few problems of his own. Not only is Christmas Eve a few days away but also the elves are a little behind on their toy quota. Problems get worse for Santa when, on top of all of this, an efficiency expert (played by Kevin Spacey) is flown in to evaluate the North Pole operation and ultimately shut it down if things do not run smooth enough.
One of the film’s fatal flaws, aside from being terribly unfunny, is the amount of screen time given to Vince Vaughn. Just because his typical rant-style has worked well in other, better films, doesn’t mean it works for all of them. Director David Dobkin, who also directed Vaughn in Clay Pigeons (1998) and Wedding Crashers(2005), never seems to know when to cut away from it. But this really is the least of this film’s problems.
The film runs for almost 2 hours and could easily benefit from a good trimming. The exposition alone could be about 20 minutes shorter. Too much time is spent introducing us to Fred and Nicholas’ humble beginnings. It’s not like there is so much going on there we couldn’t figure out with a brief line of dialogue or bit of acting from either actor.
Giamatti handles the Santa persona rather well and it’s actually a bit of a shame that he couldn’t do this in a better, less formulaic, film. The only other convincing performances come from a string of famous siblings – Frank Stallone, Stephen Baldwin and Roger Clinton – in a sequence involving a “Siblings Anonymous” meeting. Sure, they are playing themselves and complaining about how their famed brothers destroyed their egos and so forth, but it’s the best bit in the entire film.
The film is obviously geared towards younger audiences who may not have seen the decades of Christmas movies the rest of us have endured. So why not just stay home and rent them a better one instead? That really shouldn’t be that difficult. Watch Bad Santa instead; that’s sure to get the holiday spirit going a lot better than this film.
