If Jesus Christ can have survived some of the screen biographies of him, Santa Claus should be able to survive worse. Of course Jesus never had a script written about him by David Newman, but really the Newman touch, whose dents are evident all throughout the Superman series, for example, only makes an impact here with the belated arrival of John Lithgow as the vilest villain since the cancellation of the Batman TV show ("Have you ever had one of those days when you just want to drop a bomb on the whole world?"), a cigar-chewing, scenery-chewing toy manufacturer who schemes to upstage Santa with a springtime promotion entitled "Christmas II." Before Lithgow, the dominant tone of the script is that of run-amok whimsy, with particularly a lot of play on the word "elf": "elf-control," "elf-conscious," "elf-assurance," "elf-portrait," ad nauseam. There must somewhere be very young or developmentally arrested individuals who could sit through this without pain, but the movie is not for the sensitive. And the only thing that will protect the latter from the visual side of it -- especially at the unlived-in North Pole, with its fresh-lacquered wood, its garish fitments out of a Lego pre-school construction kit, its red-or-green-polka-dots-on-yellow costumes, and so on -- is the variable saturation level of the print, often altogether washed-out. With Dudley Moore and David Huddleston; directed by Jeannot Szwarc. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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