Movie Review – I Believe in Santa
Principal Cast : Christina Moore, John Ducey, Sachin Bhatt, Lateefah Holder, Violet McGraw, Matthew Glave.
Synopsis: Love is a gift. But when you find out the man you’ve fallen for still believes in Santa, do you accept it – or send it back?
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Another preposterously asinine Netflix Christmas flick masquerading as warm-family fun, this low-budget effort from writer John Ducey and his real-life actress wife Christina Moore makes for very tedious viewing. This is bargain-basement stuff, a hollow, charisma-free romantic comedy of little value other than bloating the streaming platforms’ back catalogue. Christina Moore plays Lisa, a newspaper columnist who – to nobody’s surprise – hates the Christmas season, and is trying to raise her daughter Ella (Violet McGraw) without spoiling the Big Lie that Santa doesn’t exist. When she meets and falls for corporate lawyer Tom (Ducey), she discovers that he has an absolute blazing passion, bordering on pathologically insane, for Christmas. And he’s keeping an even bigger secret from her: he legitimately believes that Santa Claus is real. Will this vacuous character trait be the one obstacle preventing Lisa from sticking with Tom forever. Honestly, for a film with such big ambitions, this leap of plot logic takes a hell of a lot of getting your head around – a grown adult believing seriously in Santa, and not in that magical Tim Allen as Santa Claus kind of way, but rather a “institutionalise him and give him hard drugs” way. Whether I Believe in Santa succeeds in overcoming this gobsmacking premise works for you is largely a matter of taste, but as a film product there’s little here worth enduring this mess for.
Bizarrely, the film’s chief problem is that the two central characters have almost zero screen chemistry together. I know, that’s surprising considering they’re married in real life, but neither John Ducey or Christina Moore can summon the romantic spark to sell both their relationship within this film or the struggle to overcome the central conceit of believing in Santa, and that pretty much makes most of what happens here redundant. Without a spark of romance to offer the film falls astoundingly flat, a stupefyingly inert puzzle-box of scenes that clumsily engage the viewer with alternatively disbelief or ham-fisted “acting”. Truth be told, I thought Ducey was a gay man pretending to be straight, before I looked him up and realised he was playing against his wife – I’m happy to admit that I was wrong, but it doesn’t help explain the utter absence of romantic comportment the film attempts to engage with. The performances against Ducey’s screenplay are woeful, with the exception of Sachin Bhatt (playing a gay Muslim character) and The Rookie’s Matthew Glave, as Lisa’s newspaper editor, both of whom make acting look easy. Everyone else, though – whiffs it big time. It doesn’t help that the film’s climactic bobsled race is cheaply produced, a lot of it filmed against a greenscreen so obvious it’ll make your eyes bleed; notwithstanding the budgetary issues of location shooting, I Believe In Santa lacks the magic essence a Christmas film with that title might imply. There’s a stiff silliness to the film, an eye-roll within a deep sigh making everything that transpires here so idiotic I couldn’t help but feel cringe every moment a forward plot step is taken. You might believe in Santa, but if you’re watching this adult-centered movie you most certainly won’t after this.
Who wrote this?
