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.
Men Yelling Men Yelling Men Yelling
Look. Is The Rock a perfect movie? No. But is it a perfect movie? Maybe!
Just describing the plot of The Rock is a lush, lip-smacking thrill, like a piece of bacon that is all fatty rind, like a bowl of Lucky Charms that is all marshmallows—so many elements that could each, alone, be too much, here combined into one film that somehow works, one great, baroque cinnamon roll that is all the middle of the cinnamon roll, The Jetsons
