Dear Santa

It's not easy for little Liam to celebrate Christmas when his parents are noisy downstairs, especially after the family tries to recover from a painful family tragedy. Things don't get any easier for the poor boy when his letter to Santa accidentally falls into the clutches of Lucifer himself, and Liam's soul is suddenly at stake when the satanic Jack Black tries to appeal to Liam's more selfish desires...

The premise of a dyslexic kid misspelling 'Santa' and writing a letter to Satan is fun on paper. It probably would have worked very well as a short sketch. But as a feature film? Then it's exactly what you'd expect: a torturously slow and drawn-out torment that doesn't elicit a single laugh. It's stilted. Terribly repetitive. It feels like the film never ends, as if Satan himself has punished the viewer with an eternally long junk reel. The set-up leaves no room for timing when it comes to the jokes, and at the same time, far too much room for drawn-out dialogue scenes that could easily have been cut.

Characters are constantly explaining things to each other, as if stuck in a loop, and the dialogue is so unnaturally written and performed that you wonder if the script wasn't written by an AI. Even when the film introduces some new twists (after an hour and 30 minutes), the film fails to engage and the ending is just disgustingly contrived. That's how unpolished, sugar-coated and artificial this Christmas tale feels. As if there aren't enough of those in the sticky American Christmas film climate. Dear Santa belongs to that filler category you'd do best to scroll past in search of something more sensible to watch on a streaming service.

This has certainly not been Jack Black's year. The comedian does his best to give the film some sort of edge, but it's not even Black who provides the film's very few moments that could raise a smile. Black just feels tired and awkward here as a horned bad guy, more or less resembling some goofy kid version of Beetlejuice. I'm not even going to go into the stiff child acting and Post Malone's very long cameo, but that probably goes without saying. Despite some funny lines, there are no laughs to be had here.

If you still have a child's mind, the film's fart humour can certainly entertain somewhat, but I find it hard to see how 12-year-olds - the film's target audience - will be able to get through this when there are so many more appealing and funnier alternatives. The adults in the household will struggle all the more with the humourless desperation of the film. In other words, it's not a film for anyone other than possibly Jack Black himself. We're used to low-quality films around Christmas time, but Red One may just have competition for the worst (Christmas) film of the year...