DEFENDING SANTA
Santa gets arrested when he's mistaken for a crime suspect, and a trial ensues.
For a start, that logline is a complete fucking lie. Santa is not "mistaken for a crime suspect" when he is arrested. That sentence leads one to believe that perhaps this movie begins with Santa Claus being arrested for breaking & entering while delivering toys by a well-meaning police officer, but that's not the case. Our hero, Sheriff Dean Cain, playing himself (long story), is out on a routine call during a snowy Christmas Eve when he comes across an empty car in the middle of an isolated road. He gets out to investigate, and his dog Ginger draws his attention to something amiss in the nearby woods, which turns out to be Santa Claus (Bill Lewis) planking in a snow drift.
The merry old man is face-down and very, very still, so much so that he just looks like a corpse in the snowy wilderness, and this image is honestly somewhat upsetting, because it's presented in such a matter-of-fact manner. Dean Cain calls for an ambulance as he gazes into the sky and sees Mordor on the other side of the woods, or at least that's what it looks like to me. Either that, or this movie takes place several billion years in the future, after our dying sun has expanded into a red giant, but by that time the sun's expansion would have rendered our planet uninhabitable, so that can't be right.
Unless perhaps the movie actually takes place on a terraformed Mars, then maybe this could work. So from this point forward, I'm just going to assume that the rest of Defending Santa takes place on the surface of a terraformed Mars several billion years in the future. But the sun looks fine throughout the rest of the movie, so that explanation doesn't make sense. Was the evil red light in the sky some sort of Christmas thing? Because it looked like the world was ending.
Let me check my notes...
So apparently that horrifying red light in the sky Dean Cain spotted when he found Santa's body in the woods was actually a portal to the North Pole, like a wormhole, I guess. And the portal closed after Santa failed to pass through it in time after he finished delivering his payload of toys to all the children of the world. Sure, I guess that's a rational explanation
Anyway, immediately after Dean Cain finds Santa in the woods, we cut right to Dean Cain and his daughter, who looks uncomfortably like a clone of Mara Wilson from the Miracle On 34th Street remake, visiting the comatose "John Doe" in the local hospital, only now it looks like springtime outside, but it's actually supposed to be close to Thanksgiving, and this guy's been in a coma for nearly a year, and the movie provides no transition to mark the passing of time at all in this sequence, so it's actually a bit confusing, because I spent two minutes trying to piece this timeline together in my head.
It doesn't help that we cut from a snowy night scene to a sunny daytime shot filled with green grass and leaf-laden trees that looks like it was filmed in May, then we cut from this hospital scene to a Christmas party being thrown by the local district attorney, Robert (Gary Hudson), but we learn in the middle of this scene that the party is taking place before Thanksgiving for no immediately apparent reason. So it's actually November, even though it looks like early summer. That's not at all baffling, is it?
This party scene only really exists to hastily introduce our other romantic lead, the city's new public defender, Sarah Walker. She's recently relocated from Detroit, where she quit her cushy gig at a big-time law firm due to a crisis of conscience. Essentially, she was sick and tired of helping obvious criminals escape justice, so she came to... wherever this movie takes place, to be a public defender. Coincidentally, Sarah and Dean Cain have crossed paths before, when he was in Detroit at some sort of cop convention and he asked her out for a drink, but she never showed up at the bar because she was too busy not giving a shit about this annoyingly earnest sheriff from some small town nobody's ever heard of. She could have just told the guy "no" and that would have been sufficient, but she pointlessly lead him on, knowing full well it would hurt his feelings. Maybe he just gave off a creepy vibe and she didn't know how else to get rid of him. That makes sense.
But now Sarah's living in... this small town... and she can't avoid running into sheriff Dean Cain everywhere she goes, which is pretty awkward, because he still wants to buy her that drink he promised her a few years ago, and she's a recovering alcoholic. Suddenly there's a call from the hospital: John Doe is awake, and he's hanging out with the children in the pediatric ICU! Dean Cain rushes over, thinking he's gonna have to shoot this crazy old guy before he guts any sick kids, but when he arrives he finds the dude just sitting with the patients, entertaining everybody. The kids are telling him what they want for Christmas, and he's being playful and charming, and it's all very sweet.
He speaks with a very sick young girl named Grace who tells Santa that she wants a pony for Christmas, and he conjures a miniature clip art pony out of thin air, much to her amazement. It's a goofy effect, to say the least, but in the context of the movie it's a genuine miracle, and this little moment comes back in a big way at the climax of the movie, but more on that later.
Unfortunately, only Grace saw this amazing magical feat, so nobody believes the old man when he tells them all that he's really Santa Claus, as in the genuine article, the one and only Kris Kringle. Santa tells Dean Cain that he got caught in a storm on his way home on Christmas Eve and fell from his sleigh, landing in the woods where he was later found. And Santa claims that he wasn't exactly in a coma; he was actually hibernating, which he does for eleven months out of the year after he returns from his exhausting journey each Christmas Eve. That sounds like a shitty way to live, if you ask me. He sleeps for almost an entire year because his trip around the world drains him so deeply, then he wakes up just in time to do it all over again. Santa never has any "Santa Time", it would seem, but he doesn't seem to mind at all, which is almost more disturbing.
At an emergency town council meeting, Dean Cain thinks Santa's got dementia and recommends he be transferred to a retirement home, but D.A. Robert thinks he's fucking nuts and needs to be locked away in a sanitarium. Their mutual friend, the honorable Judge Willis (John Savage), who has entirely too much sports equipment just littering his desk, doesn't know what to do about the weird old stranger in the hospital until the drunk mayor informs the assembled officials that ski season is coming up, and putting Santa on trial to confirm or deny his veracity as the real Father Christmas would be an excellent method to attract more tourism dollars to the town over the winter, and so everybody agrees that Santa be put on trial for... claiming he is who he says he is.
Now I'm not a lawyer, but from everything I've learned from some cursory research, this whole trial the mayor has dreamed up isn't at all legal, because Santa Claus hasn't been accused of any crime. He's literally being put on trial by this crooked community because he claims to be the real Santa Claus, and that's not a criminal act. At least in Miracle On 34th Street, Kris Kringle was goaded by Granville Sawyer into striking him with his cane, which was used as evidence that Kris was mentally unstable at his hearing.
In Defending Santa, a corrupt mayor, his lazy judge friend, and their D.A. drinking buddy decide to have Santa Claus formally arrested and charged with... something... because they think the "Santa Trial" will generate sufficient buzz to bring more money into the community over the busy tourist season. That's not how the criminal justice system works in the United States. We don't arrest and publicly try an innocent man who's done nothing wrong just because we think it'll become a media sensation that will attract more people to come to "the town that put Santa on trial". And Dean Cain and public defender Sarah just go along with this farce, because they seemingly have nothing better to do with their valuable time this holiday season.
Before the trial begins, Santa is transferred to a holding cell in the sheriff's station, and Dean Cain's unhinged deputy, completely unprovoked, immediately threatens to shoot the unarmed Santa where he stands for literally no reason. The first thing this psycho does when he meets Santa is ask the kindly old man to give him a reason to shoot him while his hand hovers threateningly over his holstered sidearm. He does this right in front of the Sheriff, and there are no repercussions to his actions. This lunatic should be suspended from duty at the very least for threatening to murder an unarmed prisoner, but Dean Cain just tells him to cool it with the macho stuff and that's the end of it.
I don't understand what the fuck this movie is trying to be.
At times, it tries really hard to tug on your heartstrings with scenes of heartfelt emotion like watching Dean Cain hold his dying wife on Christmas Eve as she tells him to find a new mother for their young daughter after she's gone, with the actors treating the material completely seriously, and then in the next scene we're following Dean Cain's grouchy and emasculated brother-in-law as he's quietly complaining about his ball busting wife (Jodi Sweetin?) while his infant daughter, who is strapped to his chest, loudly farts in a hospital corridor, prompting a nearby wheelchair-bound old lady, mistaking the dad for the one who dropped the bomb, to comically chastise him for his lack of manners. The whole goddamned movie is like this.
Dean Cain brings Santa home to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family because he doesn't think the old man deserves to spend the day in a holding cell, and it's all very sweet as the sheriff introduces Santa to his extended family, then everybody just leaves the house to go play full-contact football in a park. They weren't even finished cooking Thanksgiving dinner, either. They just dropped everything to go play fucking football, because the movie thought we needed an extended slapstick comedy sequence. Everybody's having a wacky time playing football in a freshly-mowed field in the middle of summer on Thanksgiving Day, and this scene goes on forever. It just keeps happening, and it's never funny, not even when Santa gets involved, using his magical powers to sabotage his opponents, literally cheating to lead his team to victory. He even makes the worthless brother-in-law twist his ankle, putting him on the sidelines and giving him yet another thing to endlessly complain about.
And don't forget about grandma, sitting in a flimsy lawn chair and pounding screwdrivers like water while she apathetically watches her family tear itself apart on the holiday gridiron. We never see grandma again, so it's safe to assume she drank herself to death that day.
Then the trial finally begins, and Santa is put on the stand. The district attorney tries to play hardball with the old man, but Santa calmly tells him a story about a young boy who received the gift of a bomber jacket many years ago. He loved that jacket dearly, but he didn't keep it for long, since the next holiday he gave it to his neighbor, a kid whose parents didn't have enough money to buy him a jacket of his own that cold winter. The gift of that bomber jacket made the boy see the true spirit of Christmas for the first time, and he never forgot his friend's generosity or his love of Christmas from that day forward. As an adult, he even began throwing early lavish Christmas parties, earlier than Thanksgiving, just so he could be the first person to tell his friends "Merry Christmas" each year.
As Santa tells this story to the grateful little boy who still lives in the district attorney's heart, the expression on the man's face softens as he remembers those magical moments in his distant past, and the movie briefly comes alive. Between the touching story as written, the soft, kindly voice of actor Bill Lewis as he relates the story to all assembled in the courtroom, and the subtle, non-verbal performance of Gary Hudson as his character relives a cherished memory that marked him forever, the scene is just about perfect, almost good enough to recommend the movie on its own. I don't know how this wonderful moment even managed to occur, but I guess the saying "even a broken clock is right twice a day" can be comfortably applied here.
The prosecution has a bombshell to drop before the trial is over, but it doesn't really matter much because D.A. Robert's heart isn't exactly into prosecuting Santa Claus after what just occurred. He still presents the evidence on Christmas Eve, the last day of the trial, that the abandoned car Dean Cain found on the road last Christmas Eve belonged to a still-missing man who looks suspiciously like Santa Claus (because he's played by the same actor), but this big reveal is completely ignored almost as soon as its presented, thanks to the witness testimony of the father of young Grace, that little girl in the pediatric ICU mentioned earlier.
Grace's father takes the stand holding a small shoe box with trembling hands. He informs the court with a shaky voice that his daughter passed away earlier that morning, and she wrote a letter to Santa Claus that he wants everybody to hear. The letter thanks Santa for the gift of the miniature pony, which she named Thunder, but she knows she won't be around to take care of it for much longer, and she wants him to find a good home for her beloved Thunder. She closes her letter with a request that Santa pay her a visit sometime in Heaven, because her daddy says "the place is full of angels".
This scene almost killed me. The actor portraying Grace's distraught father was so believable in his performance that I found myself profoundly affected. I'm not sure how much of my mood I can attribute directly to the movie, and how much of it is just a product of my own baggage, but just writing about this scene has put me on the verge of tears. I just couldn't help but feel for this character who just lost his precious daughter, his little girl, on Christmas Eve. The sound of profound loss in his voice as he read his daughter's letter aloud, pausing more than once to collect himself, trying with every fiber of his being not to completely break down right then and there, just tore me apart inside.
Of course, after reading this heart wrenching letter, he opens the shoe box and that clip art pony comes prancing out to amaze everybody in the courtroom, and the shoddy special effect kinda deflates the profundity of what just occurred. But once again, in the context of the movie, this little horse is a fucking miracle, and everybody who lays eyes on this amazing creature that should not be is utterly amazed. So the jury finds Santa guilty of being Santa, and he's free to go, which is just the best news, you guys.
As everybody shuffles out of the courtroom, D.A. Robert lingers until he's all alone, then he opens his briefcase to reveal that old bomber jacket he was given so many years ago. He tries it on, and it still fits perfectly, and that old jacket brings a warm smile to his face as he finally exits, softly humming a Christmas carol to himself as he heads home for the holidays.
But thirty seconds after this touching courtroom sequence ends, any good will the film has just built up goes completely out the window when Santa starts comically raving to Dean Cain that he has to parachute into a magical portal in the sky in the sky before it closes and Christmas is ruined for all time. Santa just doesn't have time to bask in the glory of his legal victory because it's Christmas Eve, and he has to return to the North Pole via the terrifying portal, which is due to open soon. Santa explains that the North Pole can only be reached through this portal because the North Pole isn't exactly a specific place in the world to which one could travel, but rather a fixed point in space and time that isn't accessible through any natural means, and if he misses the portal this time, it will close forever and the spirit of Christmas will wither and die, plunging the world into a second Dark Age from which the human race may never emerge.
So no pressure, guys.
Luckily, Dean Cain, who can also fly a plane, and thank goodness for that because otherwise Santa would be screwed, gets the crazy old fat man airborne so that he can jump into the portal, which can only be reached from high altitude. The plan goes off without a hitch, Santa's back where he belongs, and the world is saved. Oh, and Dean Cain and Sarah get engaged on Christmas Day, and I never bothered to mention their flowering love affair before because nobody gives a damn, not even the movie, itself.
Wait, didn't I already watch this movie last year? I swear I did. It starred Dean Cain and the story involved Santa Claus on trial, but nobody believed he was really Santa Claus until the end of the movie. Dean Cain had a young daughter there, too. I didn't hallucinate this damned movie, did I?
No, it was called The Case For Christmas, and it really happened. I had to go through my old reviews until I found this movie, because I thought I was just losing my mind. What are the odds that Dean Cain of all people would star in not one, but two mediocre made-for-TV riffs on Miracle On 34th Street?
So how does Defending Santa stack up? It's got two good scenes, and I'd even go so far as to call them great, but the rest of the movie can't hold a candle to these two touching, profound moments. Nine tenths of Defending Santa is a pile of smoldering garbage, just really goofy and dumb, and those two scenes, no matter how much I enjoyed them, are not enough for me to recommend anybody sort through so much dross just to find two glimmering diamonds.
And as a final note, what the hell happened to the missing guy who owned the car Dean Cain found in the road the previous Christmas Eve? The movie just brings this guy up and completely forgets about him immediately afterwards. Why was his car out in the middle of nowhere? What was he doing out there in the first place? Is he dead? This is really bothering me, because the movie implies that there's an elderly man lost out there, somewhere, and absolutely nobody cares about this person's well-being.
I'm glad Santa's real and all, but maybe Dean Cain could try to figure out what happened to this poor old man who's been missing for an entire fucking year, you know, if he's not too busy making out under the Christmas Tree with his boring fiancé to bother to do his fucking job.
Mommy's Dead - We actually get to see mommy while she's dying in this movie, which is a first for me. Usually, dead mommy's treated as nothing more than an unseen prop, just part of a character's tragic back story, but Defending Santa shows Dean Cain holding his dying wife in bed on Christmas Eve, which is actually a pretty jarring scene, because mommy doesn't look pretty when she's dying, which was a pretty brave choice. This movie certainly doesn't shrink away from presenting the reality of death to a potentially very young and very impressionable audience. They don't sugarcoat this shit, folks, which I guess I appreciate, but this choice doesn't make the movie itself any better.
Secret Santa - Santa's in the movie, and he can conjure living things out of thin air to the delight of dying little children!
Christmas In July! - The only scene that even bothers to try and pretend its taking place in the wintertime is the opening sequence with Dean Cain finding Santa Claus in the woods, and the scene was clearly staged with a truckload of fake snow and some digitally rendered flurries after Dean Cain exits his car. The rest of the movie is supposed to take place through late November to late December, but it always just looks like the middle of May, so at some early point in the production, everybody just gave up and stopped trying.
VERDICT: NAUGHTY
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