A fun holiday film with a lot of heart and laughs

Rating: 8/10 (9 November 2003)

Elf stars Will Ferrell as Buddy the elf in this fun holiday film. The story is rather simple; Buddy when he was a baby crawled into Santa's bag at the hospital on Christmas Eve. Santa found buddy once he returned to the North Pole and didn't want to return Buddy to the hospital since Buddy's parents put Buddy up for adoption. As he grows he is told that he was a human who has been raised by Elves and that he was adopted. Buddy then sets out to New York City to find his dad (James Caan) and spread the holiday spirit.

I feared going to see this film but when I walked out of the film I was not only happy to have seen the film but was also rather touched. The movie from the trailers looks like nothing more than a silly movie where some big elf travels to NY and gets hit by cars and falls and continues to do this throughout the film. However to my surprise this was not the movie that I thought I was seeing.
Buddy the elf is a very funny and lovable character. Will Ferrell plays the character well and you really feel for him as a character. It is a real pleasure to watch him on the big screen for the whole 1 hr and 35 minutes of this film. James Caan also comes in to this movie, as I guess in this movie you would call the Scrooge character. The film's other highlight character to me is the lovely Zooey Deschanel, who is Buddy's love interest in the film. I am a big fan of Zooey Deschanel and to me its not fair her career hasn't taking off yet. She was the highlight of many movies I have seen in the past including the Good Girl, Big Trouble, All the real girls, and Almost Famous. I guess what I am really getting to is the cast of this film was perfectly cast.
The humor of this film was a lot of slapstick style humor however thankfully no fart jokes, which was another big surprise for me. The humor sometimes in this film is in the dialog and not everyone catches the laughs. It's not all sight gags here. The film also is very beautiful. The views of New York City and the Christmas stores have a real Christmas feel to them just as if you were in New York City for Christmas. The director Jon Favreau did a great job on this film.
The problem with this film could be this, it's not really original, and it uses scenes we have all seen before in movies but the question I ask is that necessarily a bad thing? Not all the time as long as the script is good and tries to be original at times and is not a carbon copy of another movie. Elf does have scenes of movies we have seen before but it also has some things that are original, which is where it counts. This isn't a academy award winning film, it's a holiday comedy.
So in conclusion, I thought I would hate Elf because of the way they marketed the movie but after long doubt and reading endless amounts of good reviews for this film, I took my brothers and we went to see Elf. It was a funny, pleasant, and heart felt movie, which I think, would soon become a Christmas classic like Scrooged, The Christmas Story and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Elf is fun and touching and when you walk out of this film you will feel good. I highly recommend this film to not only kids but also to adults and anyone who wants to jump-start their holiday spirit. My final rating for Elf is an 8/10.