My Review of "Dear Santa"

Dear Santa is a Christmas movie that came out just recently. It's a comedy that had high hopes because of what it was planned to be. Basically, it was a Christmas movie with Jack Black as Satan, written and directed by the Farrelly brothers. What could possibly go wrong? Well I guess maybe studio intervention?

The movie starts off with a pretty funny concept. We get introduced to our main character Liam. He's an innocent 11 year old kid that has dyslexia and still believes in Santa. Despite possibly being ridiculed by his peers, he writes a letter to Santa. The problem is that he's dyslexic and writes to Satan instead of Santa.

We then get introduced to Satan who tells Liam that he's going to grant him three wishes. Though after he's finished with the wishes, Satan would then own his soul. Innocently, Liam refuses to take him up on his offer but there is a girl at school that he likes and that pretty much catalyzes the movie.

Each of the characters could possibly work in this movie but they're so varied that the story goes off into different areas that make the movie a bit messy. I do like the actors that play their characters though. I was surprised how well the kids did in keeping this movie afloat. Usually that's not the case when we have kids starring in the movie.

They could have had a lot more fun with some of the aspects that they had in the movie. Liam is supposed to be dyslexic but they only play upon this aspect of his character once or twice in the beginning. This is only to get the ball rolling and getting Satan into the picture. I found it odd that it never really gets any more attention later on in the movie.

I liked the fact that Liam is an incorruptible nice guy and that should have been the main focus of the movie. Well, this was what I thought the movie was going to get into. It would have been fun to have the Satan constantly try to push Liam to be bad and goes insane attempting to do so. That never happened.

The story of Liam's brother and the family dynamics kind of plays out of left field. I thought that story aspect could have been a movie of its own but they just added it to this one to help out later on in the movie. It was more like an afterthought that they added later on in one of the drafts to complete the story.

There are a number of celebrity cameos in this movie and one of them in particular had me really surprised. They're all small cameos to help keep our interest up with a slowly boring movie.

I can see some elements of the Farrelly fun in this movie. There are some crude and tasteless fun in this movie but I think they should have added some more. I was here for dumb fun and that's what they tried to give me. Unfortunately, not a lot of it landed. There are a lot of moments where I wanted to like this movie and really tried to get into it.

Overall, this movie falls flat and it saddens me to say kind of bored me at times. The melodrama elements really didn't work in this movie and detracted me from the fun that was being had with the movie. The actors did a great job in bringing in some of the fun. Ultimately, this movie was too unfocused for me to really gravitate to it. I have to give it a 4 out of 10. I can't recommend this to anyone.