A 2007 Christmas comedy in which Vince Vaughn plays Santa's underachieving older brother, a film Matt has defended for nineteen years like it's the Magna Carta. Norm applied the Runtime Tax and rested his case. Management screened it twice to be fair — the second viewing goes on Matt's permanent record — and issued the site's first ratified verdict. It did not go Matt's way.
Every December for nineteen years I have made this argument, and every December it improves with age like the eggnog nobody lets me finish. Fred Claus is not a dumb Christmas comedy. It is a film about what it costs to be the brother of a saint — and Paul Giamatti plays Santa not as a jolly prop but as a man buckling under quota pressure, family guilt, and a workshop with real labor problems. That is a character. That is drama in a red suit.
“The Siblings Anonymous meeting alone — actual famous brothers, playing themselves, grieving their own surnames — is a better joke than anything in the films that won awards that year.”
Vince Vaughn is doing his 90-mile-an-hour patter in a snow globe and it works, the Chicago stuff works, and the ending earns its sentiment honestly. I am aware this film is before the court. I am aware of the polling. But conviction doesn’t check the polling — the thumb is up, the hill is snow-covered, and I have brought a thermos.
Let’s do the math my colleague refuses to do. One hundred and sixteen minutes: that is eight full minutes of Runtime Tax on a comedy, a genre whose entire job is to leave before the party gets awkward. Vince Vaughn talks fast enough that it somehow feels longer — a physics problem I don’t have the tools to explain and the film doesn’t have the interest to.
“Matt says it has layers. So does a landfill.”
Here is my one concession, entered reluctantly: Paul Giamatti is genuinely trying. He plays Santa like a man being audited, and in a better film that performance gets somewhere. It is not in a better film. It is in this one, where the jokes are broad, the sled is CGI, and the third act is a hug with a budget. Thumb down, invoice attached, and I want it noted that for once — for ONCE — the man upstairs and I agree. Frame this review too.
Here's the part nobody in this building expects: it's ALMOST good. Giamatti plays Santa like a man being audited, and for a solid hour I could see Matt's case from my office window. Then the third act arrives in a holiday sweater and hugs the movie to death. Almost good is still bad — ask any third act. Norm's tax is upheld, Matt keeps the DVD, and the ruling is down. Barely. But down. This case does not come back next December.