The very idea of going to see a Christmas movie more than a week before Thanksgiving offends me. But we went anyway, because it's not that often that my wife agrees to go see a movie absent a frustrated demand from me, and that was what she agreed to see. I blame the studio (MGM, now an Amazon creature) for the early release, and will be pissed off at them for all time and will exact some vague kind of retribution at a future date.
It's a simple story: Santa Claus has been kidnapped right before Christmas. Johnson, his head of security, has to get him back before anyone notices. Lucy Liu represents a benificent governmental agency; Chris Evans is the malefactor whose soul will be saved in the course of saving Christmas. No one's enjoyment of this film will be spoiled when I tell you that there's a happy ending. And no one will be surprised to learn that the heavy handed messages of this movie are too on-the-nose for adults, while the language is surprisingly vulgar for a movie ostensibly suitable for children.
I cried first. The film starts out by evoking every childhood memory of Christmas, and it does a thorough job of that. Then I laughed, many, many times. This film tugs on every heart string and strokes every funny bone. I anticipate that, once it's spent a few years streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime TV, which I will never spend money on, it'll be a holiday standard in almost every household for the next two or three decades, by which point it will have become another It's A Wonderful Life: a classic movie that everybody knows about and occasionally actually re-watches. By then the special effects that today seem so amazingly realistic will probably seem as dated as Mr Potter's wheelchair.
After seeing this movie at a Tuesday evening matinee, we went for dinner to an Italian place in loopland that I've been wanting to try for a long time. Read my review of that place on The Curmudgeon-About-Town.
