Fatman, written and directed by Ian and Eshom Nelms. Mel Gibson, Walton Goggins, and Chance Hurstfield. Saban Films, . 100 minutes. Rated R.
As it develops, every genre slides steadily from idealism to cynicism to nihilism, and the genre of Christmas movies is no exception. Reveling in how mold-breaking it allegedly is, Fatman is, in fact, predictable and formulaic, though that doesn’t prevent some good performances from salvaging what is overall a lackluster film.
Competent but unspectacular direction, silly action sequences, a dull script, and duller set design mortally wound what might have been a quirkily fun movie featuring heartfelt deliveries from Mel Gibson, Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste, and a scenery-chewing Walton Goggins. The movie strains for serious commentary on the implications of Santa Claus’s role as a commercial mascot but fails to make any salient points. I wanted to like this movie because I thought it had a lot of promise, and I laughed several times while watching it, but I still walked away thinking about how much better it might have been.
Precedence and Reception
In the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged!, there is a fake movie preview for a film called The Night the Reindeer Died, in which Lee Majors defends Santa’s workshop from gun-wielding terrorists. The Nelms brothers apparently thought this was a great idea for a real movie, and the end result is Fatman.
Fatman is another movie that, arguably, demonstrates how out of touch the movie critics are: Over on Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a critic rating of 46% and an audience rating of 84%—though the audience rating is likely skewed since anyone who would have disliked this film probably didn’t bother watching it in the first place. That uninterested audiences stayed away is suggested by the box office numbers: This movie cost a cool twenty million but has, of this writing, made back a mere 1.2 million. That officially makes Fatman a major bomb, but since is such a bizarre year, it’s difficult to say what exactly that means.
It’s also important to remember that Fatman‘s leading star is divisive. When I read negative reviews, the first one I opened talked less about the film than about a personal dislike for Mel Gibson.
Synopsis
The Good Guys
Fatman‘s premise is simultaneously silly and clever, and the Nelms made a good choice when they decided to play the movie straight with no obvious in-jokes or winks to the camera. As the film opens, we meet Chris Cringle (Mel Gibson), a gravelly-voiced, brooding, and mostly ordinary man from rural America who’s struggling to make ends meet in the family business. As the film reveals only gradually, he is in fact Santa Claus, and though his ideal is to teach children to be good by giving gifts to the nice and punishments to the naughty, he in reality serves as a corporate mascot. For that reason, his otherwise unprofitable operation is funded by a hefty subsidy from the federal government, which compensates him for being such an important economic asset.
However, the government has recently cut his paycheck in half because kids have gotten so delinquent that Santa passes out significantly more coal than presents. The government takes this as an opportunity to put the squeeze on, financially pressuring Santa into a military contract. Through it all, Santa takes out his frustrations by practicing with a pistol, punching a heavy bag, and clenching hand exercisers while occasionally taking comfort from Mrs. Claus (Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste), who holds the family operation together by cooking, sewing, and managing the books.
The Bad Guys
Meanwhile, a rich but troubled kid named Billy (Chance Hurstfield) is incensed that he didn’t win the elementary-school science fair, so he calls the assassin he keeps on retainer (Walton Goggins) to torture the winner (Ellison Grier Butler) into giving up her blue ribbon. Such behavior, naturally, leads to coal in the stocking for Billy on Christmas morning. Enraged, Billy again calls on his assassin, this time to kill Santa Claus. Since the assassin has a lifelong obsession with Old St. Nick (for reasons only revealed at the film’s end), he readily takes the job and begins a road trip that ultimately leads him to Santa’s compound in Alaska.
Discussion
The Good
There are certainly clever things going on in this movie, including some excellent performances from actors who have only razor-thin material to work with. Gibson is entirely convincing in his portrayal of a rural businessman who’s grown despondent both because of personal failures and the state of the world. Jeanne-Baptiste is equally convincing as the longsuffering wife who holds him together. Chance Hurstfield doesn’t get a lot of screentime, but he is likable in a bad-rich-kid kind of way, and his determination to bump off Santa is worth a few sardonic laughs.
However, the real star of the picture is Walton Goggins, who gets the most development. By turns funny and menacing in his monomaniacal obsession with Santa Claus, he is the perfect choice for the villain of such a goofball thriller.
The direction and editing are also good overall, though as I’ll explain in a moment, they are lackluster exactly when they need to shine. Of note is the decision to keep all of the most fantastical elements of the story out of view: Santa makes his Christmas-Eve run, but it happens off-camera; we only see him walking away from the sleigh after he’s returned. We also meet his elves, but they are mostly unremarkable (the customary midgets with makeup and fake ears). His compound looks like a ranch anywhere in rural America, the toymaking factory being entirely underground. Even his Santa suit is low-key, consisting of little more than a fur-lined, red-dyed leather coat. To some degree, this works in the movie’s favor, as it is clear the film wants to keep anything obviously fantastical at arm’s length. But it also harms it, as I’ll explain further down.
The Bad
Fatman flubs in two important ways. The least important is in its action direction, but the most important is in its writing.
The Action
Not enough thought was put into Goggins’s assassin character. He is wildly successful as a killer, but only because he lives in a world where guns don’t make noise. Multiple times in the film, he shoots people, sometimes in broad daylight, and anyone who isn’t in his direct line of sight fails to notice. Once, he attempts to snipe a man at noon, from a car window, at street level. This was frustrating to me because it could have easily been fixed: Simply showing him sneaking up behind someone with a piano wire would have been enough to convince us that he knows how to kill a man silently, but the Nelms brothers apparently think a gun is the only possible murder weapon.
The Writing
I cannot discuss this fully without talking about the film’s ending, so I’ll go into this further down after a spoiler warning, but let me say at first that this movie does not do enough to flesh Santa Claus out. It presents us with an unusual concept of the jolly saint—he’s angry, depressed, and dependent on government money—but doesn’t tell us a thing about how he got there. He has no backstory. We learn that he can heal quickly, even from serious wounds, that he has super-strength, and that he might be immortal, but we don’t learn why. “It’s the giving that keeps him young,” one character tells us, but that is as close to an explanation as we get.
For this reason, one of the best lines in the film, one that is used in the preview, falls flat. When Santa confronts his would-be assassin, he bellows, “You think you’re the first? How do you think I got this job? You think I got it by being fat and jolly?”
This might have been a great line, except it has no answer. By the time Gibson utters this, we should have at least had an inkling of how Chris Cringle got the job, but we don’t, not even a hint. In my head-canon, Chris was formerly in a position similar to that of Goggins’ character, a man enraged at the Christmas gift-giver because of an unhappy childhood, so he assassinated Saint Nicholas and was doomed to take his place … but I just made that up. The movie suggests nothing like that.
For this reason, too, the movie’s finale fails to have the impact it might have, but that will take further discussion and some spoilers, so it will come at the end.
The Ugly
The movie doesn’t look particularly good, though I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s obvious that the writer-directors wanted everything low-key; thus, Santa and Mrs. Claus live in a rickety house from the middle of last century, Santa’s suit is purely functional, and the toy factory is a poorly lit series of subterranean hallways. I get why they did it, but I think they took it too far. A tad bit of whimsy here and there, some suggestions of holiday cheer to cut through the overall drab look, might have done much to relieve the movie’s sometimes overplayed ironic tone. This is a film about Santa Claus losing faith in himself, which is inevitable and maybe even overdue, but it forgets that there’s some real joy somewhere behind the greed and consumerism.
Final Discussion
I want to discuss how the film fits in with the Santa Claus mythos, but to do so, I have to give away the movie’s ending. You have been warned.
At the end of Fatman, Mel Gibson’s Santa has an inevitable one-on-one confrontation with the assassin, but only long after the assassin has killed all the military personnel and blown up much of Santa’s compound (guns and explosions make no noise in this movie, remember). Santa appears to have been killed, and then Mrs. Claus shoots the assassin. Afterwards, Santa recovers from his injuries, though he appears to have permanently lost an eye.
And that right there is one of the movie’s biggest mistakes: It had already established that Santa is nigh immortal, so the final confrontation lacks real tension. It probably would have been better if Goggins’s character had, while investigating Santa, discovered some sort of kryptonite and come to the compound truly prepared.
In any case, Santa and his elves figure out who sent the assassin, so in the movie’s best sequence, Santa finds Billy at home and utters dire threats, promising to drag him from his bed and exact terrible punishments if Billy ever steps out of line again. Furthermore, Santa makes clear that this is his new policy for all naughty children.
In Light of the Lore
This scene highlights just how lacking the movie is in backstory and attachment to existing Santa Claus lore. To me, the scene was great, but I’ve been reading up on older depictions of Saint Nicholas and the punishment-inflicting “companion” characters who grew up around him in the seventeenth century. This scene hearkens back to the Krampuses and Belsnickles, or to the Santa Claus who delivers a “long, black, birchen rod” for the correcting of wayward children—but most people in the audience would have no reason to know that. Like the earlier line about how he “got this job,” this scene fails to have its intended impact because it has no context.
Santa Claus as we know him is a specifically American character. During this Christmas season, I have been reading Gerry Bowler’s Santa Claus: A Biography, in which the author explains that Santa is largely the product of the “Knickerbocker School” of poets and historians in New York, who took a liking to New York’s Dutch history, especially the Dutch veneration of Saint Nicholas, and consequently reinterpreted the saint through an American—and Calvinist—lens. Although Saint Nicholas has been a giver of gifts to children since the Middle Ages, later Protestant and American reinterpretations took away his austerity and more threatening aspects to transform him into the jolly old elf who sells Coca-Cola.
I’m not saying Fatman should have dived deeply into this, but it needed to tell us something like it: It needed to tell us exactly how Chris Cringle ended up where he is, angry and depressed and dependent on the government. Had it done so, some of its most important scenes could have carried more weight. And if it did tie into older lore, it could have given its penultimate scene more bite, too: When he threatens Billy, Santa implies that he’s going back to older methods of coercion in order to deal with today’s especially naughty children, but that doesn’t mean much if we don’t know what his older methods were.
In Light of Good Storytelling
The final scene of the film, after the threatening, tries to be optimistic: After a bunch of people have been killed and Santa’s factory has been blown up, the elves are rebuilding, and they and Santa have a positive outlook. That, alas, doesn’t fit with what has gone before: Throughout the film, Santa was dependent on the government and depressed because of that dependency. He is backed into a corner. The movie’s final scene, however, whisks that corner out of existence. It is a decidedly unsatisfying conclusion.
Final Thoughts
One thing this movie certainly deserves credit for: It is entirely convincing in its depiction of rural America. Mel Gibson plays a hard-working man who drives a pickup, grouses about the youth of today, grudgingly takes a government paycheck, and manages the physical labor on his farm while his wife holds things together through calm assurances and by managing the finances. Since this is a part of the country with which Hollywood is utterly out of touch, it is astonishing that Fatman has captured it, apparently effortlessly and with no insulting asides. For that reason alone, I think Fatman is worth a watch, though I admit I wish that Chris Cringle looked slightly less like an average joe and a little more like, you know, Santa Claus.
