The Santa Clause 2 (2002)

The Santa Clause 2 arrives eight years after its predecessor with a contractual crisis: Scott Calvin, now fully installed as Santa, discovers a Mrs. Clause buried in the fine print, obliging him to acquire a wife before Christmas Eve or forfeit the sleigh. This is a premise that could, in other hands, invite commentary on the transactional nature of marriage. The film declines the invitation. It wants a school principal romance and a snowball fight, and it gets both, and the institution of matrimony escapes without a scratch.

The more interesting business happens at the North Pole, where a life-sized animatronic double begins enforcing the handbook with zero tolerance, declaring every child naughty and seizing power with an army of toy soldiers. A viewer hunting for subtext about rigid bureaucracy or the cruelty of zero-tolerance discipline could find a crumb here. The film is not that viewer's friend. Toy Santa is a gag, defeated by a snowball fight, and the movie returns to the business of warm family reconciliation without pausing to interrogate the factory floor or the elves' labor conditions.

Tim Allen does his Tim Allen things, and Elizabeth Mitchell is charming. No elf has a coming-out arc, no character discloses a diagnosis, and history is left exactly where it was. The cast is white, the themes are Christmas, the politics are nonexistent, and the movie was number one at the domestic box office anyway, which suggests audiences were not starved for sermonizing. There is no climate anxiety in the snow, no racial reckoning among the elves, no body-positive reading of the naughty list. It is a sequel, it is a product, and it is content to be both. After the exhausting moral instruction of the modern family film, there is something restful about a picture that wants only to sell a tie-in and get you home by ten. A clean sheet, then, and a mild recommendation for anyone seeking a Christmas movie with nothing on its mind.