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I am reviewing this per it’s genre, gratuitous violent comedy. This movie contains violence and gore.
“It’s Christmas Magic, I don’t fully understand it.” and variations of that quote are spoken often by David Harbour’s Santa Claus. It’s a remarkable summary of the movie.
First off, the characters are not terribly complex. We get the estranged couple with their young daughter, the motley crew of mercenaries, the overbearing billionaire grandmother who requires her children to dote and pander, and the wannabe social media persona in the form of the other grandkid. The only characters that really matter are Santa Claus, the young daughter and her parents and the grandmother.
The bad guys led by John Leguizamo’s Scrooge have the typical assortment of character tropes in the hacker girl, the knives woman, the gentleman crook, the psycho and the turncoat. Add in an indeterminate number of goons and we have a target rich environment for our action hero: Santa.
The movie starts with a sad, but slightly uplifting moment quickly dashed by bit of comic regurgitation just to remind us what kind of movie we’re watching. Then we spend some time getting to know the characters. Everything is well foreshadowed.
Aside from the expected battles between Santa and the bad guys, we get a few moments of Home-Alonesque booby-trap antics. The daughter had watched Home Alone the day of the events of the movie. The main difference between our protagonist and Kevin’s devices are the sprays and puddles of blood. Nothing out-of-the ordinary for the genre and just the right amount of gratuitous viscera.
There is a scene with plenty of amusingly presented violence that features far more bad guys getting their asses handed to them than we knew were present. I think we see 15 bad guys prior to the most violent streak in the movie, but there are probably 30-40 getting more comeuppance than a lump of coal from Santa in that one particular scene.
The movie has enough heart to make it an instant Christmas Classic. There, I said it. The movie had my eyes welling up multiple times.
The humorous violence and gore will probably keep it off the Hallmark Channel. The humor is well timed and well entwined with the violence.
They make enough use of the Santa magic to separate this film from any random action hero Christmas movie. The Christmas catch phrases were almost all included in the trailer, but worth seeing in context.
In order, I would say this is a Christmas Movie, a funny move, and a violent movie. Funny comes ahead of violence because the violence is rarely present without the humor but there are plenty of other humorous moments that don’t include violence.
Overall, five out of five stars. If you can stomach a few moments of gore and a graphic moment of finger torture, I highly recommend this movie this Christmas and every Christmas.
Wil Ogden's Blog 