A Thoroughly Manufactured Holiday Novelty, Fake Like a Plastic Tree

Rating: 3/10 (21 November 2014)

Transparently forced Christmas "magic" that can't even lean on its CG visuals for support. Despite the wide variety of gaudy, jolly ghosts, elves and Christmas nicknacks flittering about the screen, this movie has no spirit, no zeal, no life. It sure goes through the motions, producing overly-familiar shapes, sounds and colors by the shovelful, but that never translates to more real emotion than the pajama section of a Sears catalog. It's mostly a one-man show, with Tom Hanks providing voices for a good ninety percent of the cast, but he's unable to work any holiday miracles with such flat source material. The wealth of bad, empty computer graphics do the film no favors, either, somehow managing to bridge the gap between hollow marionettes and the unnerving denizens of the uncanny valley. A desperate effort to join the endless parade of holiday classics, it's a noble-minded (but incompetent) talent flush.