Fred Claus

A FEW years back, angry parents without access to the censor's advisory notes got themselves in a bit of a tizzy about Bad Santa. The film's title alone, they suggested, might lure innocent wee things into the cinema and risk exposing them to more depravity than they get at home.

Fans of Frat Pack comedies might, quite reasonably, have the opposite reaction to Fred Claus. Starring Vince Vaughn as Santa's errant brother, the picture boasts a poster depicting the star messing about on a tricycle while Paul Giamatti's Pa Christmas looks on disapprovingly. (The image graces the cover of today's Ticket.) There is no explicit mention of beer and prostitutes, but Vaughnites may still expect some conspicuous depravity with their seasonal cheer.

Well, though not nearly so terrible as the Santa Clause films (how could it be?), Fred Claus leans more towards that class of cheesy family comedy than it does towards snowy hooliganism.

The picture begins with an examination of the fractious relations the two Claus boys endured as children. Nicholas, later to become the patron saint of Coca Cola and department stores, is so fanatically devoted to good deeds and merriment that, while inventing the Christmas tree, he fails to notice that he is also destroying Fred's birdhouse. Decades later, Fred, now hopelessly cynical, works in Chicago as a repo man while Nick, portly and red-suited, organises the distribution of toys from his lair beyond the Arctic Circle.

Following some embarrassment with the police, Fred is forced to make his way northwards and, after initially causing chaos in Santa's kingdom, matures into a kinder, gentler, infinitely more boring man.

The presence of such cinematic royalty as Kevin Spacey, Rachel Weisz, Kathy Bates and Miranda Richardson suggests that we might be in for a better class of festive rubbish. Sadly, it is not to be.

Though passably diverting at first, the film, like so many in this genre, abandons itself totally to sentimental slush in its lousy final act. Stay home and deck the halls instead.