The Santa Clause (1994)

So I’m back, which is a surprise considering I’ve been very busy. though I’m really pleased to be sitting here at a computer again typing my review which feels strange, since I haven’t done it for such a long time.

I think this Christmas themed film was similar in characteristics to a Christmas cracker, it was full of surprises, enjoyment and atmosphere but what it contained was overall a fairly bad quality.

The effects were unsatisfactory at best and indescribable at worst and personally, I think the big problem they had was the amount of challenges they had put in front of the editing team, from a sleigh in the snow globe to edited in reindeer voices and if it wasn’t obvious enough I was sat in my chair long enough to see ‘reindeer voices’ on the credits- speculation confirmed! Watching the sleigh go made me cringe because it was so utterly fake, and yes the view over San Francisco was green screen, at least I think so. Oh yeah, one more thing the north pole was also green screen, it was so obvious!!!!

While it’s in my head, I really like the play on words in the title, the Santa Clause, well unless by chance John Pasquin spelt it wrong and decided he liked it that way.

Personally, I thought the acting was good, as per usual, after all these people are paid to do this. Though I couldn’t stand the overly awkward American accent put on by Eric Lloyd, well I guess maybe his accent was like that anyway because on Wikipedia it says birthplace- America. Tim Allen was awesome. Usually in films, such as secret life of pets and nativity (still my favourite), the main character isn’t particularly significant, they often portray the ordinary person, here it began the same but ended up with a really quirky character and I think Allen did this really well. Now for my favourite character Judy the Elf, she was so good, nice and kind hearted. I can’t recognise Page Tamada on the cast list at all, this film is really old! One thing I couldn’t stand was the really unconvincing attempt at putting children in as elves, it really didn’t work, in fact the north pole would have been more convincing as soft play area than Santa’s house, I think they took it too far in trying to allow the extras to have so much fun.

Oh yeah the elves ears were really disappointing, I probably could have got them out of a TESCO sale no offence costume department. Though I must say I loved the Santa costume and Neil’s Sweater, which really didn’t work.

The plot, at the start it was the all too familiar beginning, divorce. How dramatic! Not when you’ve seen it about 1 million times. Then the twist, well something had to happen, (and I won’t tell you what it was because I can’t reveal the plot, it is a FILMCLUB rule) which involves them going to the north pole, spoiler alert! And then back to the normal world where everything has changed. This is turning out to be a Shakespeare like structure. Old World, Green world or Polar world and New World, well they switch between the Polar world and the New world a bit but it’s still the same.

I hope you enjoyed this review and hopefully it won’t be so long before I write my next.