A kitschy little Christmas
Mrs. Claus joins her high-flying husband for a quirky but fun yuletide adventure
The Christmas Chronicles 2 Netflix
Not so long ago, there were three or four new Christmas movies a year. Now it seems like there are 30 or 40, and if you're wondering how that assembly line of holiday product gets filled, the answer is: by recycling endless variations on the same yuletide fairy-tale kitsch and we're-all-one-big-nettlesomeChristmas-family glorified-sitcom cheer.
Take The Christmas Chronicles 2. Directed by Chris Columbus, with his leftover-'80s synthetic-is-the-new-real life'sa-snow-globe touch, it's a movie in which Santa Claus, played with winning macho bluster by Kurt Russell, has to save Christmas from the depredations of an angry fallen elf.
But it's also a family-therapy movie; a tale about the logistics of Christmas set at a North Pole that's like a resort shopping mall filled with snow that looks like a blanket of Ivory-soap shavings; a Raiders of the Lost Santa sleigh-race-through-theair action movie; and a comedy bauble that's so snarky about the second-handedness of its holiday tropes that it somehow turns cynicism into sentimentality.
In vintage Netflix fashion, The Christmas Chronicles 2 is an hour and 55 minutes long (the TV classics A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas are each 25 minutes; Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer is 55 minutes; Will Ferrell's Elf is 97 minutes), which makes it way too much of a mediocre thing, like a dozen stocking stuffers stuffed into one movie.
Yet by the time the characters lapse into a wistful chorus of O Christmas Tree, Russell's Santa, looking like one of those early 20th-century paintings of a laughing Father Christmas, holds down the centre of things, and this time Mrs. Claus is more than an off-screen presence.
She's played by Goldie Hawn at her rosiest, and she and Russell, reunited onscreen for the first time since Overboard (1987), make the most of their aging-like-fine-wine romantic glow.
But the main character, as in the first Christmas Chronicles (2018), is the precocious, saddened, ringlet-haired Kate (Darby Camp), who is still grappling with the death of her firefighter dad.
Spending Christmas in Cancun with her mother (Kimberly Williams-paisley) and her mom's new beau (Tyrese Gibson), Kate and his son, Jack (Jahzir Bruno), get spun through a wormhole to the North Pole, where Santa, once again, could use her help.
But here's the rub: Belsnickel (Julian Dennison), the former elf protege of Santa, feeling rejected, wants to take over for Santa. He steals the village's Christmas-tree star, which is infused with holy light from the Star of Bethlehem, and then sets about trying to destroy his jolly red-suited rival.
Belsnickel sends Santa, Kate and Jack on a sleigh ride into the past, stranding them at Logan Airport in Boston in 1990, where the Christmas spirit is so low that Santa's reindeer — who fly based on how much Christmas spirit there is around them — can't take off. This sequence is by far the best in the film, because it's got a taste of the real world: the travellers in a funk because their flights get cancelled, a clever sequence in which Kate has to shoplift triple-a batteries because her 2020 currency looks counterfeit.
The rest of The Christmas Chronicles 2 plays like a half-hearted National Treasure opus laced with family healing.
At a harmless piece of hokum like this one, you giggle and grin a few times, you see the ruptures healed by Christmas, and you get to hang out with a Santa who's traditional but cool.
When Christmas movies cease to be special (when they're all scooped out of the same river of non-stop product), there's something almost reassuring about a film that lifts you up by knowingly dumbing Christmas down.