SALON

Friday, Nov 9, 2007 12:00 PM UTC

“Fred Claus”

Vince Vaughn stars as Santa's morally questionable big brother. Ho ho! Ha ha! At least the reindeer are charming.

By

Topics: Movies,

It’s now been three Christmases since the near-miraculous appearance of Terry Zwigoff’s perversely uplifting holiday classic “Bad Santa,” a picture so rapturously disreputable that it’s become the gold standard for people who generally can’t stand holiday movies. A holiday movie like “Bad Santa,” so filled with sex and swear words that it couldn’t be anything but life-affirming, is a rare and wonderful thing. Still, every year hope springs eternal: This year’s entry in the holiday-malaise sweepstakes is “Fred Claus,” directed by David Dobkin, who not so long ago gave us the sufficiently cranky surprise hit “Wedding Crashers.” In “Fred Claus,” Vince Vaughn is the Fred of the title, the older sibling of the way-too-saintly St. Nick (played, with neurotic believability, by Paul Giamatti — just in case there’s anyone out there who still happens to believe).

Fred makes his living as a repo man (his shabby Chicago digs are furnished with gleaming repossessed finds like exercise bikes and plasma-screen TVs), which tells us right off that his cup doesn’t exactly runneth over with the milk of human kindness. He has an opportunity to make some big bucks, but he has to borrow big bucks to do it: He rings up the North Pole to sweet-talk his kid brother into a quickie loan, much to the dismay of Mrs. Claus (a pleasingly persnickety Miranda Richardson), who thinks her husband is too much of a softie.

Nicholas agrees to give Fred the money, but only if he’ll come up to the North Pole and work for it. Fred shows up, scowling and with bags under his eyes, and immediately starts stirring up trouble, criticizing the toy-workshop DJ (played by Ludacris, in a role that’s way too small for his outsize but as yet untapped talents) and, later, providing a window of opportunity for a conniving efficiency expert named Clyde (Kevin Spacey) to shut the North Pole down once and for all.

“Fred Claus” is a Christmas-morning glut of well-cast actors: The others who show up include Kathy Bates (as Nick and Fred’s overcritical mom), Rachel Weisz (as Fred’s long-suffering girlfriend), John Michael Higgins (as the most helpful and also the most insecure elf) and Elizabeth Banks (as a perky toy-shop-floor manager). But the movie — its script is by Dan Fogelman, from a story by Fogelman and Jessie Nelson — is both too sprawling and too stingy to give any of them much to do.

The picture starts out with an intriguing back story (in which the young Nicholas is painted as an insufferable do-gooder, to the extent that he ends up causing his older brother untold suffering). But the movie alternates between sluggish sourness and sludgy sentimentality. It jumps to life near the end, with a thrilling gift-delivery montage set to the Waitresses’ brilliant “Christmas Rapping.” And the production design, by Allan Cameron, does give us a spiffy North Pole, a snow-globe village of cozy snow-draped houses and twinkling lights, with interior details that appear to have been carved out of gingerbread-colored wood. (Much of the picture was shot at Pinewood Studios, reminding us that a beautifully built movie set can be a lot more magical than, say, Vancouver.)

But even though Vaughn knows how to build a pretty good performance out of little more than exasperated eye-rolling, he’s just coasting here, and his scenes with Giamatti have no weight and no energy. There’s some mild excitement when the two goad each other into a rambunctious snowball fight, but even that sequence devolves into listless, sloppy slapstick. “Fred Claus” does feature some very nicely groomed reindeer, a far cry from those patchy, depressed-looking creatures you see every holiday season at the petting zoo. They’re prancing and dancing as fast as they can, but they can’t pull “Fred Claus” from the rut it’s in.

Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment. More Stephanie Zacharek.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 7 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations