Schlock-Mas: Day Nine

Today's Feature: The Santa Incident

After his sleigh is shot down while flying through restricted military airspace, an earthbound Santa Claus is sought for questioning by a pair of overzealous federal agents.

They finally did it. Those trigger-happy clowns in the United States Air Force blew Santa Claus the fuck up over Oregon. That means Christmas has been canceled forever, kids. Five Stars.

Oh if only that were the entire movie, just a short film following some hapless pilot in a fighter jet blasting Father Christmas out of the sky after mistaking the flying sleigh for a UFO. But this isn't a five-minute-long short film. It's a full-length thing produced for Hallmark Channel in 2010. I'm not sure if that's exactly when it was produced, but I'm not going to bother looking it up, so that's just going to have to do. Anyhoo, the log line is misleading in that the sleigh isn't exactly shot down by the Air Force, merely struck with a missile that sends Santa Claus plummeting down to earth, where he lands on some railroad tracks by the docks in wherever the hell this film is meant to take place. The sleigh is actually fine, being protected by magic, but its emergency autopilot settings sent the sleigh back to the North Pole without its very important passenger.

So Santa's stranded in some dreary seaside town, laid out near a dock with a skull fracture, and two fucked-up children, a boy named Billy and a girl named... Other Billy... find the bloated old man on their morning walk to school, dragging him off the tracks moments before his head is pulverized by a freight train. So if these kids hadn't just happened by that morning, Santa would have been decapitated by a passing train, and that would have been the end of Christmas forever. Lucky break, fat man.

The kids love the fractured fat man because they just assume that he's the real Santa Claus, and of course he is the real Santa Claus, and they help him collect a bunch of garbage around town and set up shop in an abandoned factory on the edge of town, and Santa uses his alchemical abilities to transform the piles of detritus into shiny new toys, because despite being separated from his home base, Santa knows he has a quota to reach by Christmas Eve, which is only a few days away, and this is apparently how toys are actually made at the North Pole, with a bunch of furious hand waving over small piles of unwanted crap. The kids know about this factory because their worthless father used to take them there to play silly games before he abandoned his family for the siren song of the one-armed bandit in scenic Reno, Nevada a few years prior to the events of the film. He just took them to the factory on Christmas Eve and left them there, and nobody ever saw him again.

Now Other Billy was very young at the time and doesn't really even remember her father, but Billy is pretty fucked up over the whole situation, just brooding all of the time with a hollow look in his eyes, So he's really latched onto his mother's on-again, off-again boyfriend Sheriff Whitebread, seeing the kindly authority figure as a symbol of dependability and security in a world that's been turned upside-down by his absentee father. So it's another one of those movies. Daddy's either dead or out of the picture, allowing new romance to bloom in the ashes of past tragedy.

I'm so fucking tired of this cliché, and this is only the ninth review of the month. I've got sixteen reviews left to write, and I'm already completely finished with this bullshit. How many more times am I going to have to type some variation of "the protagonist's spouse died and/or abandoned their family" before this nightmare is over? What the fuck is wrong with the people who write these movies if this is the only narrative trick they can come up with?

We've got a lumberjack Santa Claus getting blasted out of the sky by the U.S. Air Force, stranded in some anonymous town, transforming garbage into toys with his magical powers in some abandoned factory with the aid of a pair of emotionally damaged children, being mercilessly hunted by the two most ineffective federal agents in the history of motion pictures, all the while an extraction team of loyal elves is also in town searching for their lost master, enlisting the aid of a random smart-mouthed remote-control robot to help them track down his missing jingle bells, which when combined have the power to summon his mighty flying reindeer instantaneously from any location in the world. It's a race against time to see who will find Santa Claus first, with the fate of Christmas itself hanging in the balance, and we're dealing with this tired "lost spouse" plot contrivance.

It's not like Daddy comes back at any point in the film to explain why he abandoned his kids in a condemned factory in the middle of the day a few years past. The mother just kisses the sheriff in the end and everything's fine, so why didn't the writer just have the husband die? Why did he have to run away from his family? It adds no new dimension to the plot, and there's no payoff, so it's completely pointless. Daddy just left, and that's it. This movie is tedious, and I think I would despise it if not for the work of Greg Germann.

M.V.P.

Most audiences would probably be familiar with Germann's work through the once-ridiculously popular television series Ally McBeal, where he played the prickly Richard Fish for five seasons. In The Santa Incident, he plays the paranoid Agent Erickson, a man obsessed with this mysterious figure calling himself "Santa Claus", having tracked him for years throughout the world, believing him to be the humanoid vanguard of some impending alien invasion. He wants nothing more than to get St. Nick strapped down to a sterile gurney in some clandestine government facility for a joyous night of vivisection, and he's put his entire career on the line for this one last mission to capture his elusive white whale and blow this imagined conspiracy wide open.

Greg Germann is just built for roles like these, with the perfect face and personality for playing high-strung, obsessive bureaucratic types. And he just goes to town with this portrayal, chewing up the scenery in his own distinct idiom, making for a very satisfying comedic performance. His Agent Erickson is an expertly executed, unapologetic, weirdly soft-spoken asshole who isn't afraid to punch a man in the dick if he gets in his way, and he is a sheer delight to behold. His rapport with his subservient partner Agent Cunningham (played by Sean McConaghy) is really the highlight of the entire movie, and it almost makes The Santa Incident worth watching all on its own. Their comic timing is just tremendous, with most of their banter feeling like clever improvisation, and there's no way even half of their back-and-forth antics were included in the screenplay, because they're just too good. Nothing else in the story concocted by Jeffrey Scott Simmons lives up to these two characters in the slightest, so this seems to be a clear case of the actors elevating the wretched material.

I frequently laughed at the continuing misadventures of Agents Erickson and Cunningham as they bumbled their way through their investigation, tailing pedestrian Santa Claus in their unmarked government-issue automobile, following at a respectable distance of five feet, remaining as inconspicuous as humanly possible. The single funniest moment in the film occurs when Erickson commandeers his partner's binoculars to spy on Santa Claus at the abandoned factory, admonishing Cunningham on his pathetic equipment maintenance skills when he notices how dirty the lenses have become. It sounds so simple and so stupid, but these two actors make it work against all odds, with Erickson giving Cunningham a subdued dressing-down as he uses his partner's necktie to polish the binocular lenses, with Cunningham offering a stream of mumbled apologies as he just absorbs this ridiculous abuse. It's the best scene in the entire fucking movie, and it last maybe one minute.

Am I even still talking about The Santa Incident? Is there anything more to say aside from "it sucks"? Because it does suck. Quite a lot, actually. I suppose I did find it oddly amusing that Santa escaped Agent Erickson's nefarious clutches during the climax by dosing him with "Christmas Spirit", reducing the fastidious federal agent to a gibbering, childish mess with only a wind-up toy rabbit for a companion in the end. Erickson doesn't get a happy ending, much to my surprise, left alone rolling on magical Molly in an abandoned factory, his law enforcement career left in ruins, reduced to a laughingstock by the actions of Father Christmas.

Erickson makes it plain early on in the film that if he fails to deliver on this Hail Mary pass of a mission that his career will be brought to an unceremonious end as he's swept under the rug as an unreliable kook, and that's exactly what happens in the end. The moment when he realizes that his entire adult life has amounted to absolutely nothing is actually captured in the final moments of the movie, as he's lying on the dirty floor of that factory, wallowing in his own misery. It's actually quite shocking to me that this character was given no form of redemption in the narrative, never wavering from his conviction that "Santa Claus" is actually some odious extraterrestrial invader when all available evidence points to the contrary. In the end, he's completely undone by his own short-sightedness, which is highly unusual for such movies, to say the least. I appreciate this.

But is it enough to recommend the movie? Is one performance (really two, considering Sean McConaghy as Agent Cunningham, but to a much lesser degree) and one mild surprise enough to warrant a favorable rating? Is it enough to make me forget literally everything else? Absolutely fucking not. The Santa Incident is a pile of garbage. Greg Germann's performance deserves a better movie.

VERDICT: BURN, BABY, BURN!