Fred Claus: Critic Reviews

Constructed like a rattling Santa sack of stocking stuffers, most of them plastic, doled out with little confidence about what adults want from a jingle-bell comedy (we want Elf!), and even less about what engages a kid (they want Elf!).

Fred Claus is a tacky would-be comedy about family dysfunction that fronts some Scrooge attitude only to dissolve into slobbering sentimentality and canned uplift.

The spirit of Scrooge surges strong within me having watched this chillingly cynical and unfunny Christmas movie.

As derivative and predictable as any of the holiday comedies of the past few years, providing audiences with at best a handful of laughs. Most of it is uninspired.

Vaughn's con-man jive doesn't get much play in this one; he spends most of his time as a bitter creep, and the writing (by Dan Fogelman) isn't sharp enough to make the hipster-at-the-North-Pole theme pay off in any meaningful way.

[Vaughn's] naughtiness has never seemed so approachably nice.

The exceptional cast -- Vaughn, Giamatti, Kathy Bates, Kevin Spacey, Rachel Weisz -- is an embarrassment of riches for a script this thin and this beholden to family-fare protocol, with its mushy-minded moral and slick sentimentality.

About as funny as a sack of coal.

The movie's constantly shifting timbre takes some getting used to, and it's hard to escape the feeling that a whole lot of actors (Rachel Weisz, Kathy Bates, Miranda Richardson) are wasted in a whole lot of roles.

There's no more fleet talker flapping his lips with free associative aplomb than Vaughn, and he uses his edgy powers for good here.

[Fred Claus] has apparently studied Elf and figured out everything that could have gone wrong with its fish-out-of-water Christmas fable.

Fred Claus seems a clever installment, not a seasonal classic, a buffet whose many nibbles you sample, move on and quickly forget.

Like so many secular, big-studio Christmas comedies, this isn't naughty enough to be funny or nice enough to be uplifting.

Freely mixing reality therapy, fairy tale and satire, Dobkin's film does not maintain a consistent tone.

A pleasant little seasonal gift.

An amiable but awkward Christmas bauble that depends too much on charm substituting for timing.

Bah. Humbug.

The burden of having a famous sibling seems fraught with comedic possibilities, but whatever potential existed has been squandered and then some in Fred Claus, dumping coal into everyone's holiday stocking.

There is more plot in the average Geico commercial, so the movie pads itself with detours into sketch ideas that don't develop past the basic concept.

Friend, you may find yourself wondering how we ever survived the holidays without a Christmas dose of Vince.

It senselessly dims an idea that should shine as brightly as Rudolph's nose.

Fred Claus ends up closer in spirit to Eugene O'Neill than it is to Dr. Seuss.

Even though Vaughn knows how to build a pretty good performance out of little more than exasperated eye-rolling, he's just coasting here, and his scenes with Giamatti have no weight and no energy.

The film's multitude of flaws might be more easily forgiven if the movie didn't overstay its welcome by at least a half-hour.

With Santa Claus movies like Fred Claus, who needs Ebenezer Scrooge?