The Devil himself would seek to distance himself from this.
Jack Black as Satan masquerading as Santa Claus should be the ultimate festive slam dunk, but Dear Santa ends up as tinsel-wrapped trip to purgatory. It’s frankly astonishing that it’s taken this long for Black to be tapped for a festive role and hopefully this sloppily executed high-concept low-quality romp won’t put him off putting on the big red suit in future. As you’d expect, he’s devilishly good, bringing his signature chaotic energy to a premise that deserved far better treatment than it gets here.
The plot centres on young Liam Turner (Robert Timothy Smith), a dyslexic sixth-grader who accidentally summons Satan instead of Santa by misspelling a Christmas letter. Sensing an opportunity to snap up a soul, Satan (Black) offers Liam three wishes in the run up to the Christmas Holidays.
It’s a crass if amusing set-up (although the film too often equates dyslexia with plain old dumb) as you’d expect from one of the Farrelly brothers. What you might not expect is how much and how often the film pulls its punches, shying away from its potential for gross-out hilarity and aggressively stupid shenanigans in favour of a twee family-friendly PG exploration of its subject, replete with sub-Hallmark Christmas movie sentimentality and family drama. Drama which abjectly fails to resonate thanks to the utter lack of any kind of familial chemistry between Smith and the actors playing his parents Brianne Howey and Hayes MacArthur, all three of whom act like they’d never met before the cameras started rolling.
The humour rarely ventures beyond safe, predictable territory, and the stakes never feel high enough to truly captivate, with only a sequence where the devil curses a condescending teacher (P J Byrne) with explosive diarrhoea a standout highlighting what we might have had if Dear Santa embraced a sharper edge or more daring approach. Instead we’re saddled with cringe-inducing appearances by Post Malone as himself and clumsily articulated family trauma. could have transformed this into a modern Christmas classic.
There are fleeting moments of charm, most of them courtesy of Black, who gleefully revels in the role of Satan trying to pass as jolly old Saint Nick and is deserving of a far, far better vehicle than this for his satanic seasonal shenanigans. The production design is suitably festive, with bright, cheery visuals that evoke holiday spirit, but it feels flat and cheap, with Black’s own instagram feed offering better production values – and comedy.
Dear Santa is almost without merit, and it’s far from memorable – in fact it’s one you might try to forget. It’s a film that doesn’t so much flirt with greatness as peep at greatness from a distance with a pair of binoculars and whoever sold their soul to Satan to get this made got ripped off.
