For a moment there, it seemed so hopeful. Netflix’s big Christmas film for 2018 came with the huge draw of Kurt Russell – old Snake Plissken himself – as Santa Claus. And indeed he is the best thing about former animator Clay Katis’ The Christmas Chronicles which rather disappointingly turns out very quickly to be nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times before.
The rot sets in before the credits have even finished rolling over a montage of Christmasses captured on an old-fashioned video camera that chart the growing up of Teddy (Judah Lewis) and his little sister Kate (Kate) over the course of a decade. It becomes clear very quickly that the film is going to be ticking all the Christmas movie stereotype boxes when we learn that dad (Oliver Hudson) has died since last Christmas and, of course, the kids are taking it badly, particularly Teddy who has become a sort of low level juvenile delinquent. As Christmas Eve dawns, Kate is reviewing the old recordings when she spots a red-clothed arm reaching into one shot and leaving a present under the tree. Deciding that this is in fact Santa she persuades Teddy to stay up that night and try to capture video evidence of Santa who does indeed turn up in the shape of Russell. Inadvertently hitching a ride in his sleigh, the siblings wreak havoc as they cause Santa to lose both his magic hat and a sack full of presents and the race is on to retrieve both so that he can finish his mission before disaster strikes (the last time he failed to deliver all his presents it led to the Dark Ages…)
The plot is entirely predictable, wearyingly so in fact, the CGI not really up to snuff at times (though the shots of Santa and he reindeer arriving above the kids’ home is pretty spectacular) and the kids rapidly become as annoying as any other little brats in this sort of thing. Russell really is everything here and he just about manages to save the film and make it watchable. He’s fantastic as a myth-busting Santa (he dismisses the idea of all that “ho ho ho-ing” as “fake news” and is genuinely offended when Kate points out that he’s not as fat as legend would have it) and is clearly having the time of his life in the last role anyone would have thought of offering him. Never more so perhaps than when he starts an elaborate musical number when he’s banged up in jail (Steven Van Zandt and the Disciples of Soul are usefully also in the slammer to provide the music) and once again channeling Elvis. It’s just a shame that he gives his all to a film that’s far too lazy to deserve it.
Cliches pile upon stereotypes which pile upon hackneyed situations better played out elsewhere. It has a few decent action set pieces, a few amusing gags and some nice cameos (the appearance of Mrs Claus towards the end is well nigh perfect under the circumstances) but the script is all over the place, drifting aimlessly from one set-piece to the next such that we very soon forget what Santa and the kids are trying to achieve in the first place.It sparkles whenever Russell is on screen, undermining most of our expectations about Santa and Christmas, albeit in a series on one-liners that are rarely explored in too much depth, but becomes depressingly ordinary whenever he’s not around
Had they spent more time with Russell and given him something a bit more exciting to work with than the threadbare mission of trying to reignite the Christmas spirit in a pair of kids who have lost in due to circumstances beyond their control The Christmas Chronicles may have been more fun. It has flashes of subversiveness that are dropped almost as soon as they surface and letting Russell loose on that kind of material would have been far more rewarding. After all these years and all those tedious Hallmark made-for-TV Christmas films, it’s surely time for a different spin on the old Christmas cheer. This isn’t it but Russell suggests that if anyone was brave enough to try it, he’s the man for the job. Watch it for Russell but if you’re over the age of, say, ten you’re unlikely to make it all the way through without much exasperated sighing and bored fidgeting.
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