Through the seven levels of the candy cane forest and the sea of twirly, swirly gumdrops...

Rating: 7/10 (2 December 2007)

I'm not usually a big fan of the sort of 'comedy' that Hollywood likes to put out, but this movie is GREAT! First, let me quickly sum it up. Buddy (Will Farrell) crawled into Santa's sack of gifts as a baby, and ended up being raised at the North Pole and working in Santa's toy shop. He's not near as good as making toys as the other elves, and one day he finds out he's actually human. With Santa's blessing, he makes his way to New York City to find his dad.
Needless to say, his dad, Walter Hobbs (James Caan) isn't too thrilled to be confronted by an apparently delusional guy claiming he's his son. Walter ends up having blood tests done, and Buddy is really his son. Then he makes efforts to integrate him into both his family and his work place, with often hilarious results.
All right, enough with the summary, you can find that anywhere! This movie is FABULOUS, and I usually despise anything to do with Will Farrell or Christmas. His acting in this movie is just perfect - Buddy wanders around with a perpetually curious, excited, dreamy sort of expression, and comes up with the most gut-busting things to say, all with a perfectly straight face.
The rest of the family (Mary Steenburgen as Emily and Daniel Tay as Michael) are great and perfectly believable. I usually don't even like the kids in family movies like this, finding them either nauseatingly sweet or horrifyingly ill-mannered, but I really enjoyed Michael. And poor Walter - he's in a good but often difficult job, and overseen by a tyrant control-freak boss we don't meet until fairly close to the end of the film. A small mention to Jovie (Zooey Deschanel), since she was fairly good, but I wasn't as fond of her character as I could have been.
Bottom line - the acting in this movie is brilliant, and it's pretty much non-stop laughs. I really only have one complaint about this movie - I suppose it's to be expected, but I really could have done without the sickly-sweet ending. It could have been worse, but I found the scene with everyone singing to bring Santa's sleigh up to the proper flying height to be really annoying. Other than that, though - I just CANNOT get over how funny and totally re-watchable this movie is!