Sometimes unsurprisingly cheesy, but an overall impressive Christmas comedy

Rating: 7/10 (22 November 2008)

I have now seen a bunch of movies starring former "Saturday Night Live" comedian Will Ferrell, but it took me a while to get around to seeing this one, even though I have now been aware of its existence for probably about three years. It's getting to be that time of year again, and just yesterday, I finally rented "Elf", not exactly sure how impressed I would be. It could have easily turned out to be yet another cheesy, boring family movie from recent years, but while it may seem like that at times, it usually isn't. It's sometimes cheesy, and certainly not consistently hilarious, but I'm still impressed.
One Christmas Eve, a baby boy at an orphanage is placed in his crib shortly before Santa comes. When Santa is not looking, the baby crawls into his sack and stows away to the North Pole, which is where he's finally discovered in that sack! The elves name him Buddy, after the label on his diaper, and Papa Elf volunteers to raise him. So, Buddy grows up at the North Pole, living the life of an elf, and still thinking he's one of them, even though he's a lot bigger than the others, and can't make toys nearly as fast as them. After finally finding out that he's actually a human, he learns about his real father, Walter Hobbs, who is a children's book publishing executive in New York, and doesn't even know Buddy was born! Buddy learns from Santa that Walter is on his naughty list, due to his selfishness, and the human raised by elves sets out to New York to find his father and change him. Obviously, this won't be easy, and it doesn't help that Buddy has never experienced the human world that awaits.
The film starts out with an opening narration from Papa Elf, which certainly isn't the best part, and the segment where he says how trolls once worked for Santa, but they weren't toilet trained, showing an example with a troll in a diaper, may suggest the film is going to be another cheap gross-out comedy for kids. But hey, not so fast! The vast majority of the film is definitely NOT like that! I got some BIG laughs out of this movie, I think starting with some of the gags that involve Buddy's life as a grown human at the North Pole. I definitely laughed pretty hard when the main character meets a raccoon on his way to New York and tries to be affectionate with it! After he arrives in the city, the things he does there, being unfamiliar with life in a community like this, a lot different from the North Pole, are also good for laughs. Some of the gags I didn't care much for, including Buddy spinning around in a revolving door until he throws up in a garbage can, but for the most part, Will Ferrell's antics in the lead role didn't fail to amuse me. Interesting story as well.
Being about Santa and his elves at the North Pole, one might think "Elf" is strictly for kids, and I guess I thought that might be the case. However, overall, I would say it has enough to please both child and adult viewers, not ALL of them of course (it's obviously not for the many Will Ferrell haters out there), but a lot of them. Now, there are obvious reasons why this movie is rated PG, a great example being Jovie (an employee at Gimbels, a clothing store in New York) singing in the shower, and Buddy coming into the restroom to sing along, not realizing she's naked! I found this to be another comedic highlight in the film, but parents might want to be cautious. Anyway, while this movie clearly isn't perfectly clean family fun, I would say it's close enough to it, and a lot better than the last Christmas movie I watched, "Deck the Halls", that's for sure