Fred Claus (2007)

Fred Claus arrives with the wearying confidence of a holiday comedy that believes a man in a rumpled coat can carry two hours of runtime on charm alone. Vince Vaughn plays the estranged brother of Santa, a Chicago repo man who resents a sibling who got the immortality and the workshop while he got the debt. The film sets this sibling rivalry against a North Pole staffed by elves and audited by Kevin Spacey's efficiency expert, a man with a clipboard and a three-strike policy. It is a lot of machinery for a story that mostly wants to be about a guy learning to hug his brother.

The film carries a faint current of social awareness, the kind that arrives without announcement and leaves the same way. Rachel Weisz writes parking tickets and Kathy Bates plays the mother, and Ludacris spins records as the workshop DJ, and none of it is asked to mean anything. There is a young orphan named Slam whom Fred mentors, and the film allows that a child in a bad situation might be judged unfairly by a system that keeps a list. A bureaucrat who measures productivity and finds the workshop wanting supplies the closest thing to a villain, a mild jab at the efficiency mindset and nothing more. These gestures are present, and then they are gone.

Where the film does commit is in its closing sermon, when Fred insists that naughty children are not bad, merely unlucky in circumstance, and that every child deserves a gift. It is a gentle homily, delivered with a straight face and a full heart. The movie is harmless, overlong, and about as subversive as a fruitcake. The elves work, the brothers reconcile, and the audience is left to consider what it has witnessed. Not much, but sincerely.