“Fred Claus”Warner BrothersDirected by David DobkinWritten by Dan Fogelman
Starring Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti, Rachel Weisz, Miranda Richardson and Kathy Bates
Rated PG/116 minutesOne-and-a-half out of four stars
There’s not a lot to say about Vince Vaughn movies that hasn’t already been said by Stewie Griffin. Stewie summed it up when he did his impression of every Vince Vaughn movie ever made: “I’m incapable of loving another person. Oh, wait. No I’m not.”
This weekend, Vaughn’s going to put another mark in his quirky relationship comedy column with his new movie “Fred Claus.”
The film begins with the story of its titular character Fred Claus. Fred is a nice, well-meaning kid, but it turns out that anything good Fred does gets overshadowed by his even nicer, much more well-meaning younger brother Nicholas.
“Why can’t you be more like your brother?” Momma Claus incessantly scolds.
It’s years of emotional baggage in the making and, inevitably, Fred has enough of living in his brother’s shadow, turns sour and becomes the poster boy for naughty children.
Flash forward 500 years — when Nicholas eventually become Santa, his entire family stopped aging, one of the perks of being a saint, but everyone knows that, of course — and now we have Fred (played by Vaughn) as a slick, slimy, unhappy man living in Chicago. The antithesis of his younger brother, Fred is now a repo man, taking away the “presents” Santa left for kids in previous years.
Unfortunately, Vaughn doesn’t bother to act in the film, playing another version of the same motor-mouthed smart ass he’s played for a decade, and between stealing from the Salvation Army and double-talking anyone he comes in contact with, including his girlfriend Wanda (Rachel Weisz), Vaughn drives any sympathy for his character into the ground.
Vaughn can’t shoulder all the blame for this sleigh wreck of a film.
In fact, there’s just so much that goes wrong in “Fred Claus,” that this Christmas, Santa ought to give naughty kids copies of the movie instead of lumps of coal.
For a family holiday film, “Fred Claus” is too long, too acidic and too out of touch with the themes of Christmas to be anything other than a waste of 116 min. At the North Pole, the elves are a disgruntled lot (they’re violent, I mean really violent, and although screenwriter Dan Fogelman might think jive-talking elves ready to throw down at the slightest provocation are funny, they’re not — they’re just dumb), and Santa (Paul Giamatti) is a bumbling, indulgent fool who plays more like an alcoholic, hypertensive version of Ernest Borgnine than any conceivable incarnation of the Wise Jolly Fat One.
Then there’s the evil corporate consultant Mr. Northcutt (what a clever allusion! Maybe they could have come up with an even better one and called him Dr. Evil) played by Kevin Spacey, sent to the North Pole to shut down Santa’s operation. When Northcutt’s not spending his time sneering wry observations at Santa and Co., he’s hanging out in the workshop, shredding kids’ Christmas letters and wallowing in his own lame sense of rottenness.
“I’m so evil,” he weakly emotes every time he comes into the frame, and Spacey, for all his acting skill, never once tries to raise the performance out of the squalor.
Not that any of the other characters who populate “Fred Claus” are much more endearing — Nicolas’ wife Mrs. Claus (Miranda Richardson) is a total bitch who spews a nonstop torrent of venom for the film’s nearly two-hour runtime, and the original Mrs. Claus (Kathy Bates) — Fred and Santa’s mother — is so off-putting as the obnoxious mom-who-won’t-shut-the-hell-up that I couldn’t help but wish for a polar bear to wander into Santa’s workshop and eat her condescending holiday ass.
Make no mistake about it: the characters in “Fred Claus” hate each other and not in a silly, entertaining sort of way. The poisonous confrontations between them leave the screen cold and hostile, no matter how many jokes they sling to crack the ice.
With characters so thoroughly undermined and unsympathetic, “Fred Claus” probably can’t sink any lower, right? Wrong. Apparently Hollywood is so out of touch with audiences these days that it believes a Christmas movie wouldn’t be worth its weight in fruitcake without a few veiled sex jokes (“Can’t get the sleigh up, Santa?”), an unnecessary urinal scene and mountains of Elizabeth Banks’ low-cut cleavage. The film seemed so eager to cram in the cheap crassness that I kept waiting for Santa to rip a juicy holiday fart — but, thankfully, it never materialized.