Fatman Parent Guide

Christmas seems to get harder every year, and that goes double for Chris Kringle (Mel Gibson). Even with the support of his loving wife, Ruth (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and his highly loyal workforce of sugared-up elves, he just can’t make ends meet. His existing deal with the U.S. government stipulates that he gets payed at a certain rate per present delivered, but there simply aren’t enough kids on the “nice” list anymore. With more coal going down more chimneys, Chris is seeing less revenue. So he strikes a deal with the army, manufacturing aircraft control panels during the first two months of the year to keep Christmas alive. Even this desperate measure doesn’t solve his problems: little Billy Wenan (Chance Hurstfield) is incensed about the coal he received, and has hired a contract killer (Walton Goggins) to get rid of old Saint Nick…for good.

Ostensibly, this movie is for people like me: the kind of maniacs who will argue that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. My favourite holiday films are The Thing and The Shining, so I exceed the target audience in terms of festive insanity. Unfortunately, there’s a difference between those movies and Fatman, and that is that those movies are fun to watch. Now, I’ve seen much worse than this – Bad Santa springs merrily to mind with its constant obscenity and profanity. But that doesn’t improve Fatman, which still just feels like a two-hour remake of The Night Santa Went Crazy by Weird Al.

This is obviously unsuitable for children. Although it is thankfully less obscene than the aforementioned Bad Santa, it is still profanity-riddled and even more bullet-riddled. I didn’t bother to keep a body count because, frankly, the movie wasn’t that interesting in the first place and adding math only seemed to make it worse, but you can rest assured that more than a few people get messily shot. Add a healthy sprinkling of profanity and you’ve got a Christmas cookie only suitable for adults with a high tolerance for bad cinema.

The movie keeps hinting at moral lessons about attitude, gratitude, and selling out, but never actually bothers to develop them. Although little Billy certainly learns some lessons about hiring a hitman to go after Santa, it’s less about having a moral epiphany and more about being threatened into better behavior. While I’m sure I’d also be better behaved if a heavily bearded Mel Gibson showed up in my room with his Patented Crazy Eyes at full strength, self-preservation hardly qualifies as character development. Then again, we were all brought up with the idea of a jolly old elf who sees us when we’re sleeping and knows when we’re awake. When we already share this terrifyingly omniscient Santa with our kids, Mel Gibson’s heavily armed version seems, well, redundant.