Fatman (2020)

Fatman arrives with a premise that sounds like a dare: Mel Gibson as a burned-out Santa Claus, subsisting on government subsidies in the Alaskan wilderness, while a murderous twelve-year-old with a trust fund hires a hitman to settle a coal-related grievance. The Nelms brothers play it grim, which is the only defensible choice, and the result is a film that takes itself seriously enough to be dull and not seriously enough to be interesting. It is a dark comedy that mislaid the comedy and kept the dark.

The cultural ledger here is thin but not empty. Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Ruth Cringle, the wife and moderating influence, and her presence lends the film a quiet dignity its screenplay does not earn. She also dispatches the assassin in the third act, a moment of competence that registers faintly as a gesture toward female agency without ever becoming an argument about anything. The remaining cast is white and the film has no interest in race as a subject. No LGBTQ characters appear, no climate anxieties intrude, and the title's fixation on Santa's waistline is a grim visual gag, not a body-positive statement. There are no neurodivergent characters and no revisionist history to speak of.

Where the film does gesture at meaning, it does so lightly. The government holds an interest in Christmas as economic stimulus, the military wants Santa's elves to build fighter jet components, and a wealthy child uses his grandmother's money to fund a murder. These are notes of institutional greed and inherited privilege, played for texture instead of thesis. The film intimates that children have grown vicious and the world has grown selfish, but it never stops to lecture us about it. It simply lets the cruelty sit there, unresolved. As a cultural document, it is nearly inert. As a Christmas film, it is a lump of coal, which may have been the point.