Ah, the holidays, when families (some families, possibly, maybe) gather ’round the hearth to enjoy the traditional Fudge Reinhold, the Peter Boyled Potatoes, the Tim Watermallen Salad, and watch Tim Allen’s The Santa Clause (may its celluloid never decay). It’s not the most important Christmas movie, nor the best Christmas movie, nor really a beloved Christmas movie, but it is technically a movie. And it’s the only movie that teaches us one of the lesser-known meanings of Christmas: that putting on a dead man’s pants constitutes a binding legal agreement to assume all his debts and obligations.
We open at some dumb corporate party for poseurs. Peter Boyle, soulless toy king, is honoring Midwest marketing and distribution team Scott Calvin and Susan Perry for their work shilling some sort of hideous chauvinist ice witch called, “Do It All for You Dolly.” Susan gets only a few words into her acceptance speech when Scott (Tim Allen) interrupts because he has no time for thanking people like a woman, he ONLY HAS TIME FOR PROFITS. After high-fiving Johnson from Sales for incessantly pressing his boner against his secretary, Tim Allen bails on the party and vrooms off into the night.
On his drive home, Tim Allen makes it clear that he does not give a fuck about holiday cheer. Eeeeew, a Christmas tree with a bear on it!?!? HORK. A children’s merry snowball fight? UGH, JUST EMBALM ME ALREADY. Fuck you, bell-ringing charity Santa! VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
He’s late for his divorced dad weekend custody drop-off snide remark summit, but it’s NBD because he’s not really that into his dumb kid anyway. Exactly what Tim Allen’s character is into that makes him so single-mindedly disdainful of parenting, non-mute women, and holiday cheer is never revealed. This is a cinematic technique known as “not fucking bothering.” Tim Allen is hella mad at his ex-wife’s new husband, Neil (Judge Reinhold), for telling his kid, Charlie, that there’s no Santa Claus, even though there obviously isn’t. Judge Reinhold is a psychiatrist, and because this is the ’90s, Tim Allen’s character HATES PSYCHIATRISTS even more than he hates having a consistent and discernible personality. (As was scribed in the ancient texts: every movie from the ’90s must include equal parts lawyer jokes, hatred for psychiatrists, and your divorced parents getting back together.)
The fact that Tim Allen only bothers to defend the wonders of childhood when it’s a convenient vehicle for dissing Judge Reinhold is not lost on Charlie, who clearly can’t stand being around this asshole (#NOTTIMALLMEN). Tim Allen attempts to win Charlie’s love back by cooking him a phat Xmas turk, but he sets it on fire (BASICALLY IMPOSSIBLE) and has to spray it with a fire extinguisher for one hour. Instead, they go to Denny’s, which apparently has two sections: the Asian people section and the sad garbage dads who don’t know how to cook turkeys section. It is not hot.
After dinner, they go home and Charlie badgers Tim Allen about the physics of reindeer flight for a while, and then Tim Allen reads “The Night Before Christmas” out loud, dad-style. This seems like a good time to mention the biggest Santa Claus loophole of all, by the way: setting aside the implausibility of flying deer and the impossibility of visiting every Christian household in a single night—if there were actually a Santa Claus, every Christmas morning parents would be like HOLY FUCK HOW DID ALL THESE PRESENTS GET INSIDE MY MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE OH MY GOD CALL 911 SHARON OH GOD KIDS RUN ACROSS THE STREET TO THE FERGUSONS’ RIGHT NOW THEY COULD STILL BE IN THE HOUSE. In other words, if there were a Santa Claus, we would know about it because there would be a Santa Claus.
Anyhooz, suddenly, there’s a commotion on the roof! A clatter!
“DAD, a clatter!!!”
“Charlie, do you know how to call 911?”
“Sure, 911!”
(This movie calls that dialogue a “joke.”)
Tim Allen runs outside in his underpants and discovers a fat old man clomping around on the roof. Distracted by Tim Allen’s shouts, the man slips and falls off the roof AND DIES. Right there on Tim Allen’s lawn. Tim Allen stands and stares at the man for several minutes, doing nothing. DUDE, YOU NEED TO CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE. EVEN BURGLARS DESERVE MEDICAL CARE. Instead, unperturbed by the fact that there is a rapidly rigor-mortifying grandfather in his yard, Tim Allen checks the man’s ID and it’s just a business card that says Santa on it. On the back: “If something should happen to me, put on my suit. The reindeer will know what to do.” So specific. Is it that dangerous being Santa? He sounds like a sexy DA who went undercover and got in too deep on SVU.
A magic ladder appears (“the Rose Suchak Ladder Company”—LINEMOUTH) and Tim Allen and son discover that there’s a herd of fucking caribou hitched to a fancy sled on top of their house. The two regard the caribou herd as one might look at an unusual mushroom, or some poorly written microwave instructions. Like, “Huh.” They are just not that weirded out by it.
Charlie, being an idiot child, wants to hop in the sleigh and let the reindeer drag them off the roof to their deaths—“Are you gonna put on the suit like the card said? I wanna go too!”—but Tim Allen says no. “YOU NEVER DO WHAT I WANT TO DO!” Charlie laments. YEAH. JUDGE REINHOLD ALWAYS LETS ME PUT ON A DEAD MAN’S CLOTHES AND RIDE A DEER.
Then this inexplicable exchange happens:
Tim Allen: Stay away from those reindeer! You don’t know where they’ve been! They all look like they’ve got key lime disease!
Reindeer: FAAAAAARRRTT.
And then this:
Tim Allen (standing next to Santa’s sleigh): There’s no such thing as Santa’s sleigh!
Charlie: What about the reindeer? These are Santa’s reindeer, aren’t they?
Tim Allen: I hope not!
How high are you guys right now.
Tim Allen, who still is not wearing pants, agrees that they can sit in the sleigh for a sec, but then accidentally says the magic words, “Let’s go!” and the reindeer gallop off the roof and start flying around. (Not the most practical magic words, IMO. It’s like having ooh as your safe word.) The frigid December air begins to pimple his naked thighs, so he finally, begrudgingly, puts on Santa’s enormous pants. NOW IT’S ON. The reindeer drag him, screaming, from house to house, and at each stop Santa’s magic sack sucks Tim Allen down the chimney and squeezes him out like a big red turd. Occasionally, he encounters a precocious child sleeping near the Christmas tree, and they exchange “hilarious” banter:
Child: You’re supposed to drink the milk.
Tim Allen: I am lactose intolerant.
Again, if this ever happened even once in history, WE WOULD KNOW ABOUT IT because there would be a police report and many screams.
Oh, ugh, and then Tim Allen does his horrible caveman catchphrase thing in the form of a “ho ho ho,” which sucked my soul out of my mouth like a haunted cat. Then the reindeer ditch them in a frozen wasteland, which turns out to be the North Pole. Tim Allen is mad perplexed by being at the North Pole (like, waaaaaaaay more freaked out than he was about visiting every house in the world in a magic sled) until David Krumholz shows up and is like, “Yo. I am a sarcastic elf. Here’s a snow globe.”
Krumholz explains that Tim Allen is now required to be Santa Claus because of the “Santa Clause,” a line of fine print on Santa’s business card requiring anyone who puts on Santa’s pants to abandon his life, career, and home, and just permanently be Santa until death because “children hold the spirit of Christmas inside their hearts” or something. I’m sorry, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD TIM ALLEN BE REQUIRED TO BE SANTA CLAUS. You don’t fucking own Tim Allen, David Krumholz! Also, aren’t you guys sad about the fact that the last Santa Claus—a living, breathing man with whom you presumably worked for many decades, if not centuries—just fell off a roof and died, alone, in the snow? What is wrong with you people? Can someone at least go collect the body?
Tim Allen, somehow, still doesn’t believe this is happening. He wakes up in his own bed the next morning, acting like, “Oh yeah, this all seems back to normal. Yeah, I’m wearing another man’s silken pajamas, but I probably just bought them in a turk-fume-induced fugue. No big.” Charlie, on the other hand, can’t keep his dang mouth shut. When his mom picks him up, he’s all, “Oh yeah, we totally went to this elf party, and flew a few deer, and, oh yeah, Dad’s Santa now.” In an even less sensical plot development, the mom hears that and goes, “OH MY GOD, THIS IS LITERALLY CHILD ABUSE.” So she and Judge Reinhold begin scheming to get custody taken away from Tim Allen. For “pretending” to be Santa Claus. To his six-year-old child.
“You’ve got more important things to worry about,” Tim Allen quips to Judge Reinhold. “Like where you’re going to get more sweaters after the circus pulls out of town.” What does this joke mean? What is this circus that sells sweaters? How many sweaters does Judge Reinhold require? How quickly does Judge Reinhold wear his sweaters out? Why does Judge Reinhold get his sweaters at the circus? What is it about Judge Reinhold’s sweaters that indicates they are cirque-related? If Judge Reinhold needed a new sweater, why couldn’t he just purchase one at a regular store? Or wait for another circus to come to town? If there is one thing to be said for The Santa Clause, it’s that it asks more questions than it answers.
The next morning, Tim Allen awakes with a fart. AND A BEARD. The Santa Clause, apparently some sort of perverse yuletide virus, has entered its Jiminy Glick phase. No matter how much he shaves and dyes his hair and runs on the treadmill and attempts to eat a salad for lunch instead of eight crème brûlées, his body always bloops back into a fat blond goober. Plus, fat Tim Allen suddenly hates corporate toy ideas like planned obsolescence and success! He is becoming pathologically fun.
So, Tim Allen just keeps getting fatter and jollier, the ex-wife gets SO MAD about Tim Allen’s magic beard that she exiles him from Charlie’s soccer game, and Judge Reinhold just keeps saying, “You’re taking this Santa thing a little too far,” over and over again like a broken robot. Eventually, Tim Allen’s custody gets revoked by an even shittier judge (WEARING RED AND BEING FAT IS NOT A SAFETY ISSUE), so he does the only logical thing—he kidnaps Charlie and runs away, leading state and local police (and possibly federal agents) on what was no doubt a monumentally expensive manhunt.
Meanwhile, Judge Reinhold and the ex-wife reminisce about when they stopped believing in Santa Claus like normal humans:
Ex-Wife: I was Charlie’s age. I wrote Santa a letter every week that year. Okay. Maybe not every week, but…Boy I really wanted a Mystery Date game. Do you remember those? No, of course you don’t. No one does. I don’t even think they make them anymore, but…Well, anyway, Christmas morning came and oh I got dozens of presents, I got everything. Except Mystery Date. [CRIES.]
Judge Reinhold: I was three. And it was an Oscar Meyer Weenie Whistle. Christmas came, no Weenie Whistle. That’s when I stopped believing.
Ex-Wife [weeping]: You were three?
Judge Reinhold: Yeah.
Yo, man, I don’t want to fart on your parade here, but a whistle is not a good toy.
As the manhunt continues, Tim Allen and Charlie head to the North Pole because it’s time to deliver some presents! (Wait, has it been a year?) For some reason, the elves let Charlie design some new features on Santa’s sleigh—because that’s really who you want engineering your aeronautical devices. Inspecting the new features, Tim Allen points at two pewter goblets sitting on a small shelf. “What’s this?” he asks.
“CD!” Charlie replies.
“Compact disc! Nice!”
“No, it’s a cookie cocoa dispenser!”
HOW DID YOU THINK THAT WAS A COMPACT DISC PLAYER WHEN IT IS CLEARLY TWO GOBLETS? I HATE EVERYONE IN THIS MOVIE SO MUCH.
As they get ready to take off, Tim Allen sighs, “How could I do this without you, Charlie?” And Charlie sasses, “You couldn’t.” Um, pretty sure he could. He can do magic and he has a child army.
Upon returning to civilization, Tim Allen immediately gets ambushed by a bunch of cops and has to get rescued by these sort of Navy SEALs but the elf version. “We’re your worst nightmare. Elves with attitude.” You are correct, movie. That phrase is literally my worst nightmare.
Eventually, Tim Allen proves to Judge Reinhold and his ex-wife that he really is Santa Claus, so she burns the custody papers and for some reason the cops are like, “Eh, bygones,” about the multimillion-dollar search and rescue operation, and Judge Reinhold gets his Weenie Whistle and can FINALLY stop crying, and then Charlie tells Judge Reinhold, “I think I’m going to go into the family business.”
I’m going to push my dad off a roof and steal his magic clothes.
And then it’s over.
I think my feelings about The Santa Clause can best be summed by this (100 percent true) sentence: it took me literally an entire day to get through this ninety-minute movie because I kept getting pleasantly distracted by YouTube videos of farmers lancing cow abscesses. Happy holidays!
RATING: 2/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.