James Proclaims!

2020’s Fatman is an interesting concept that doesn’t necessarily deliver on it’s initial promise. You probably get as much out of watching the trailer as you ever could sitting through the whole movie.

For someone who has supposedly been blacklisted by Hollywood, Mel Gibson continues to get a fair amount of work. This is not his best, but whatever you make of him as a human being, you can’t fault his commitment to his craft and his take on a jaded embittered Santa Claus, struggling to make sense of a modern cynical world is actually pretty good. Walton Goggins is also good as the principal antagonist and Marianne Jean-Baptiste does a heroic job of trying to give the movie some heart.

The problem is that a fairly novel concept is all well and good, but once the novelty wears off, there isn’t much left to make the film especially interesting.

Score for Christmasishness

I’ve gone for a maximum Christmas(ish) score because this is ultimately a movie about Santa Claus. It is an admittedly unconventional version of Father Christmas, and actually a lot of the action takes place after Christmas, so there is a case for knocking some marks off. It’s not exactly family viewing, there isn’t much in the way of Christmas cheer, and I’d probably be quite happy to skip watching it in December and might have been just as happy watching something like this at any other time of year. But any movie with Santa Claus as the main protagonist has to get full marks on the Christmas(ish) scale in my book.