Far less serious but not as festively fun as I would like is 2020’s ridiculous shoot 'em up actioner Fatman, starring Mel Gibson as Santa in Ian and Eshom Nelms’s daft film that feels like a feature-length version of mock film ‘The Night the Reindeer Died’ from Scrooged. The results vary in this half-cocked tale of a gun-happy Kris Kringle being pursued by a deadly assassin (Walton Goggins) hired by a bratty 12-year-old boy, pissed that he got a lump of coal in his stocking.
This could have been fantastic but feels like a missed opportunity. Going into this, I picture Gibson’s Santa being a crotchety old version of crazy wiseguy Martin Riggs, running around in a red suit , wisecracking, plugging bad guys and making the world safer for nice kids everywhere. Instead, this Santa is a dull, despondent, grim character. For a film about Santa defending the North Pole from a hired hitman, this gritty take is strangely not much fun.
There’s little in the way of any Christmas ‘magic’ here, with most of the well-worn famous fantasy elements of the Santa legend, like his flying sleigh, either ignored, kept-off screen or explained away rationally. For instance, we learn that Santa’s toy-making operation is handsomely financed by the U.S. government to help stimulate the economy. But this Santa is tired and jaded, listening on despairingly to radio reports of rogue children setting fires and committing callous crimes. His budget is being halved because he refuses to give toys to naughty kids - and there’s now a lot of them.
He’s introduced doing target practice on tin cans bearing his sanitised likeness - a smart way to establish that this guy is pissed and he has good aim. It’s also established he has some sort of mystical healing power and will be hard to kill, setting this up nicely for an action-packed showdown.
The film, though, is more interested in spending time with Santa’s twin antagonists, rich kid with a grudge Billy (Chance Hurstfield) and Goggins’ hired gun, the ‘Skinny Man’ of this tale. Conveniently, the Skinny Man has his own reasons for wanting to take Santa out and also takes a hamster everywhere with him for reasons that I never work out.
It’s a wonderful, bonkers premise that ultimately fails because the film doesn’t know when to go for broke and push its absurdity to the limit. Too much time is spent establishing the mechanics of this gloomy world, instead of just giving us loads of shooty bang bang action set-pieces. Kringle accepts a military contract to manufacture weapons, which you'd think would provide the fat man with a shedload of cool guns and bombs and stuff to be used in a balls-out, action-packed crescendo. However, when the big shootout finally arrives, it's a bit of an unexpected damp squib and over far too quickly.
Everyone involved is definitely game, there are some real novel ideas and there's something delightfully twisted about casting the controversial Gibson as Santa but this one never truly adds up to much and leaves me desperate for something more satisfying.
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