Debuts: Sunday, Dec. 2, 8 p.m. on TNT
Premise: A high-powered TV executive (Whoopi Goldberg) is chosen from birth to replace the outgoing Santa Claus (Sir Nigel Hawthorne)–but she’s just a bit hesitant.
Notable performances: Victor Garber (Titanic) as Goldberg‘s witty boss; Alexandra Wentworth (Trial and Error) as Goldberg‘s humble, downtrodden assistant.
Should you watch?: If you’re a die-hard holiday junkie, this one’s for you. If you’re not, watch The Simpsons or the NFL on ESPN.
After watching Call Me Claus, you get a sense that executive producers Goldberg and country crooner Garth Brooks (who also contributes songs to the movie’s soundtrack) truly aimed high on this one, getting ambitious in their attempt to combine the premises of Scrooged (1988) and The Santa Clause (1994) in one film.
Attempt to.
As far as Scrooged is concerned, you’ve got the fast-lane, sardonic TV executive, Goldberg‘s Lucy Cullins, who’s indifferent about the holidays–but not about business–using her home-shopping TV station to cash in on Christmas. Marketing gimmicks of all sorts pop up in a shameless effort to net some cash. (To watch a rather humorous clip of such a scene, click here.) But, much like in Scrooged, some divine intervention drops by to show her the true spirit of the holidays.
What sort of intervention? Ah, thus we come to The Santa Clause.
A man from Lucy’s past–a department store Santa named Nick (Hawthorne) who had once spoken with her on Christmas past–shows up at the TV station to audition for a job as an on-camera Santa. Nick tries to coerce her to open her eyes to the joys of Christmas–oh, and one other thing: Nick is the real Santa Claus (and has been for the past 200 years) and he needs to find a replacement by Christmas Eve before he can retire. Understandably, she dismisses him as a kook.
As time goes by, and as Lucy begins to find contempt in the cutthroat, capitalistic ways of her world, she begins to question her lot in life. She gets a tad friendlier with Nick and allows him to deliver his pitch.
This is where the film’s greatest weakness turns up: the special effects. Nick takes Lucy on a magical journey to the North Pole to meet his (quite funny) elves and to show her an emotional flashback of herself as a child. The ploy works, somewhat, breaking down Lucy’s defenses piece by piece, but the effects do not. Bad blue-screen shots and glowing Peter Pan fairy dust cheapen this part of the film, and will likely force fans of even the most basic sci-fi films to lunge for the remote.
We’ll leave it a secret whether or not the wisecracking Lucy actually becomes the next Santa Claus, but it’s no secret that it won’t inherit the triumph of being the next Santa Clause.
