393. Fred Claus (2007)

Starring: Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti, Kevin Spacey

Director: David Dobkin

Running Time: 116 mins

Fred Claus is an American film about a man who goes to the North Pole to work for his brother, Nick (Santa) Claus, where he must save Christmas and Santa from an evil efficiency officer threatening to move the holiday base to the South Pole.

Well, this film didn’t really work very well in my opinion. Of course, it did the obvious job of a simple and partially entertaining festive film, which all Christmas films do anyway, however its originality and comedic value was indeed disappointing.

When you’ve got such a star-studded cast in a film (Vince Vaughn, Elizabeth Banks, Rachel Weisz AND KEVIN SPACEY), you might expect some entertainment value, however it failed to bring that about for the majority of the film, focussing much more on making not necessarily an enjoyable, but festive atmosphere, so it was definitely a fantastic film for Christmas value, but not entertainment.

Having said that, there were some subtle details I did like. Mainly Vince Vaughn. Firstly, as he plays a cynic so well, chucking him into the middle of the happy Christmas holiday was actually a very funny touch, as well as the fact that he, one of the tallest actors in Hollywood, was put amongst an elf world, for extra comic effect.

Despite those contrasts being enjoyable, I found one very poor. This film did try too hard to do both fun, slapstick humour, however it also really wanted to have all that sentimental Christmas cheese that you always find, and that blend didn’t work in the end, making for a very annoying atmosphere, so because of that, I’ll give this a 5.7.