The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause: Critic Reviews

This Styrofoam snowman of a sequel overdoses on its own candy-cane-colored sugary cheer.

The third though probably not the last in the successful Clause franchise, this latest installment again stars Tim Allen as the Everyman turned Father Christmas.

Jack Frost gains control of Santa's workshop and turns it into a Las Vegas-style theme park -- supposedly a hideous inversion of Christmas values. So blandly commercialized is the movie's vision of the holiday that you can hardly tell the difference.

Allen and Short seem to be having so much fun that their enthusiasm is entirely contagious. Let the season begin.

The movie is more cute than funny. Smiles are plentiful, but outright laughs are widely scattered.

A thing of consummate craftsmanship, a smoothly engineered and fundamentally lifeless object that's nevertheless capable of giving even the grinchiest moviegoers a brief attack of the warm-and-fuzzies.

Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, with Martin Short as Jack Frost, means we're getting a turkey and a ham for the holidays.

The movie's as icy as Jack's hair, as lifeless as its animatronic, flatulent reindeer.

It's time to send this one-trick reindeer to the glue factory.

Perfect entertainment for five-year olds and sheer torture for the unlucky parent(s) accompanying them to the theater.

What is seriously missing here is any sense of fun and warmth, which the other movies did possess. This one looks like work.

Allen looks silly, tired and bored this time in the fat suit and beard, while the movie presents the irritating Martin Short as Jack Frost, nipping at your nerves as Santa's nemesis in a bid to take over and (gasp!) commercialize Christmas.

Magical (if mindless) family holiday fun.

You look at a movie like this and wonder how some screenwriters can have the temerity to go on strike

Special effects are in abundance, but none of them are very well-produced, much like the film on the whole.

It's sad to see the life sucked out of a series that started so well.

Short's skill and total commitment to his role make him no straw-dog villain, and his chemistry with Allen helps the movie's Santa feel like a real live person and not an imperturbable icon.

Frost turns the occasion into a swag-saturated consumer orgy, which the film condemns even as it hams up product placement for Red Bull.

While it may concern elves and Christmas, 'The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause' is more dreary than cheery.

There is no escaping the banality of it all.

A little muddled and derivative but what do we expect, really?

Christmas cheer is in short supply in The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, a feeble festive farce that's more no-no-no than ho-ho-ho.