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    Fred Claus

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

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    It’s contrived family Christmas comedy time with Vince Vaughn. This year, he’s giving us the gift of uninspired comedy known as “Fred Claus”. Our film follows Fred Claus (Vince Vaughn), the brother of Nicholas Claus (Paul Giamatti) Ever since he was born, Nicholas was just the sweetest, nicest little kid. In fact, his first words were “Ho, ho ho! ” (get it?!) and whenever he would receive gifts as a child, he would hand them out to less fortunate children. As the years passed by, Nicholas grew kinder and kinder, while Fred grew bitter and resentful. Nick has become Saint Nicholas and set up office in the North Pole as Santa Claus while Fred runs a repo company in Chicago (What a shock, Vince Vaughn in Chicago) where he takes away presents from people who can’t afford the payments. While stealing from the Salvation Army, Fred gets arrested and is bailed out by his brother. Nick agrees to help Fred, but only if he comes to visit for Christmas. The timing couldn’t be worse though, because the people who fund the whole Santa operation are auditing Nick.

    What a weird setup. I can only assume that the people auditing Nick are working for God, because they’ve already shut down the Easter Bunny and unless things go perfectly right, it’s going to be the end of Christmas as well. Kevin Spacey reprises his role from “Superman Returns” and plays Lex Luthor (taking on the fake alias of “Clyde Northcut” to avoid copyright issues I’m sure), the auditor overlooking the North Pole operations. Will Fred’s distaste of Christmas cause him to be disruptive at the North Pole? You bet. Will he eventually learn to warm up to the holiday and end up saving Christmas? Answering that would be spoiling the movie.

    The film is filled with juvenile humor that revolves mostly around short people jumping around for the kids and Vaughn’s trademark witty fast-talk for the adults. I also really resent the fact that we’ve got not one, but two predictable love plots present. It’s not enough that Christmas might be gone, forever but we also have that whole “Will Fred become a mature adult and get back together with his girlfriend” thing and another love story where an elf named Willy (John Michael Higgins) is in love with Santa’s Little Helper, Charlene (Elizabeth Banks) Apparently, Santa employs a single human woman at the North Pole because she’s good with numbers, better than any elf could be. Alright, but does he have to dress her up in a short Christmas-themed outfit that shows off her cleavage all the time? This is a movie for kids right? What do they care about the hottie in the red skirt getting together with the elf? Maybe she was hired as a paid mistress for Santa but the deal fell through. Who knows.

    Why is it that so many Christmas movies seem to have no internal logic? Take the whole sainthood element for instance. Apparently, when you become a saint, you become an immortal, like in “Highlander”, but minus the decapitation thing. Your entire family becomes immortal too as a bonus. If Christmas stops, forever, would that revoke Santa’s sainthood? If it did, would he then age super rapidly and crumble into dust? Shouldn’t there be tons of Saints walking around, along with their immortal loved ones? How far does the loved ones thing go on by the way? We see that the Claus parents are still alive and that Mrs. Claus is immortal too. If they got a divorce, does she stop being immortal? So if Fred marries his girlfriend, will she become immortal? What about their children? Are we supposed to believe that in the hundreds of years that Fred has been alive, he has never accidentally fathered any children or gotten married? Then again, he hates Christmas but isn’t smart enough to move to a country where the season is not celebrated so maybe he’s not clever enough to get together with a lady.

    I found my mind wandering and asking silly theoretical questions during the film because there’s just not a lot going on here. We’ve got a lot of jokes about the elves being short. There’s an extended dance sequence where all the elves dance to Elvis, thanks to Fred’s “rebellious” attitude, and some predictable fat jokes at the expense of Santa. The movie is really desperate for some kind of plot so it inserts a villain that’s got no business being in this movie and it baffles my mind because this nearly 2 hour movie is way too long. Come to think of it though, the insertion of Clyde Northcutt is one of the only genuinely entertaining elements in the film. You’ll have fun replacing his lines with some of the dialogue from “Superman Returns” and the movie wants you to do that, by placing numerous references to the DC Comics character throughout.

    I really resented the phoney sentimental moments where Fred (I keep wanting to call him Vince because he plays the same character in every single movie) hates Christmas and loves making fun of children whose toys get taken away, but is then shown to have affection for a poor little orphaned boy. If you’re going to make him into a grouch, just make him into a grouch. Don’t try and trick me into thinking he’s something else.

    There’s not even any imagination when it comes to Santa’s workshop, the flying sleigh or the elf village. It’s a quickly thought up idea, thrown together with a couple explanations of why things work that way, churned out quickly for the holiday season and then forgotten. It’s just Vince Vaughn doing his shtick while we place him next to Ludacris as an elf (badly done by the way) and the same generic messages you’ve seen in countless other movies. You can do a lot better than “Fred Claus” this holiday season. (On Dvd, December 13, 2013)

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    adamwatchesmovies@  25.12.2014 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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