Dear Santa (2024)

There is a moment in Dear Santa when a sixth grader named Liam writes a letter to Santa Claus, misspells the name, and summons a demon instead. This is the entire premise, and the film commits to it with the grim determination of a studio fulfilling a contractual obligation. Bobby Farrelly directs from a script by Ricky Blitt and Peter Farrelly, and the result arrived on Paramount+ with almost no fanfare, which the marketing department likely recognized as the correct instinct. Jack Black plays the visitor from below with a growl borrowed from late-period Nicholson, and he is the only element here operating at full voltage.

The picture's most substantive preoccupation is Liam's dyslexia, which carries the plot rather than decorating it. His learning difference is the reason the letter goes astray, the reason his classmates torment him, and the reason a psychologist is eventually summoned to the family living room. That is meaningful narrative weight, and the film treats the condition with a sincerity that borders on case-study. The representation is narrow but genuine. Elsewhere the ledger is thinner. Liam's mother and his crush drift through the story as satellites of the boy's interior life, and the film's one gesture toward physical self-acceptance, a wish that fixes a friend's overbite, solves the problem with orthodontia instead of tolerance. The demon's lessons about selfishness and standing up for oneself are delivered plainly, though the film stops short of turning them into a sermon.

What remains is a holiday comedy that cannot decide whether it wants to be naughty or nice, and so settles for neither. The pacing sags between set pieces, the emotional beats around a dead brother land with a thud, and the resolution arrives via a bureaucratic loophole in demonic contract law. It is competent, forgettable, and oddly earnest about a boy who just wants his family to stop falling apart. We have seen worse. We have also seen this exact film several times before, usually with better jokes.