Fred Claus (Vince Vaughn) always thought he was going to be the best big brother in the world. But when you’re younger sibling turns out to be the most giving person on the face of the planet and grows up to become a bona fide saint, as the years roll by it suddenly becomes easier and easier to hold a grudge.

Paul Giamatti and Vince Vaughn in Warner Bros.' Fred Claus

That’s exactly the case for him. His younger brother Kris (Paul Giamatti) grew up to become Santa Claus, and provide children across the globe with beautiful handmade toys each and every Christmas morning. But when Fred finds himself in need of a pile of cash to get a gambling business started, the only person he can turn to is the jolly guy wearing the red suit, the older Claus heading to the North Pole to help out just days before the chimney climbing big night.

Yet all is not joyous in the land of toys and toymakers. An efficiency expert named Clyde (Kevin Spacey) has descended upon Christmastown with Scrooge-like dreams of shutting things down and Fred’s inconsiderate selfishness is helping him do it. Faced with little time and under the strain of too many children needing a present, these two men must find a way to repair their bonds of brotherhood and meet all their orders before Christmas is bureaucratically cancelled. It won’t be easy, true, but if the brothers Claus can succeed they’ll manage to resurrect the greatest holiday gift of them all – their own family.

Fred Claus is not a very good movie. It’s extremely poorly scripted and co-writer and director David Dobkin (re-teaming with Wedding Crashers cohort Vaughn) plays things out like a serious a sketches instead of a fully formed motion picture. The special effects are shockingly minor and the final moments are so underwhelming and forced they feel like thankfully excised vignettes from one of Tim Allen’s The Santa Claus features. It is, without a doubt, a true waste of time, and for the life of me I can’t really feel like very many out there are going to come out of the theater feeling like one second of their time had been anything other than severely misspent.

Still, with a cast like this one (which also features Rachel Weisz, Kathy Bates, Miranda Richardson, Elizabeth Banks, Ludacris and an absolutely wonderful John Michael Higgins) it can’t all be bad, and every now and then the film does spring just enough to life that sitting through all 115 minutes isn’t a complete and total bore. I never hated it (which is certainly more than I can say for Elf), and while bits of this make the Santa Claus: The Movie look like a masterpiece others are just funny enough I must admit to laughing out loud.

But so what? I already knew Vaughn was one of the best improvisational funnymen working in movies today, and while is razor sharp line delivery can have some real zing when he starts to get going if the story it’s latched on to is so brutally flimsy it’s almost impossible to care. Worse, some of what he says borders on being so sexually suggestive and adult you have to wonder who exactly this supposed family film is actually targeted at. If this were something like Bad Santa then this probably wouldn’t matter but that’s simply not the case, and what worked in adult fair like The Break-Up or in Old School doesn’t necessarily do the same in an all-ages holiday entertainment express train like this one here. 

In other words, even with the few funny bits and some nice work by the majority of the cast members I didn’t really care for Fred Claus. By the time it was over I’d already shrugged my shoulders, closed up my notebook and managed to inch a few seats closer to the door. As films celebrating the magic of the Christmas holiday are concerned this one is far more naughty than nice, and even taking a lump of coal to the box office a person would still be paying more to see it then the darn thing is actually worth.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Fred Claus Theatrical Trailer