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Not the gift you wanted

Despite fine cast, 'Fred Claus' falters as a holiday ornament

A great cast fights a losing battle against moldy Christmas movie material in the holiday comedy "Fred Claus."

The premise takes Scrooge and Santa and makes them brothers - with Vince Vaughn cast as the resentful older sibling who lost it all when his chubby, infuriatingly generous saint of a brother (Paul Giamatti) came along.

A fairy-tale setup quickly gives way to a contemporary setting, with the braying, angry Fred operating a repo business (taking back the toys his brothers bestows), hoping to raise enough money to open an off-track betting parlor.

St. Nick, meanwhile, is in danger of having his entire North Pole operation outsourced to the South Pole - an efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey) says the toy-making operation is outdated and is looking for an excuse to scrap it.

There's your grinch, one of a dozen familiar archetypes and ideas rehashed in a movie that borrows from venerable classics and more recent material, like "Elf." Much of the visual comedy, for instance, features the hulking Vaughn interacting with elves played by normal-sized actors, like Ludacris, whose heads have been digitally attached to midget bodies.

The characters are too familiar, and too many - as Fred scraps with do-gooder brother, he tries to on-again his off-again romance with meter maid Rachel Weisz, a subplot that goes nowhere. Weisz leveraged her Oscar win into this?

Though clearly a kids' movie, "Fred Claus" is tilted strangely toward adults, with jokes about restraining orders and interventions. Spacey's portion of the narrative becomes a meta in-joke about his role in "Superman." Another adults-only sequence features celebrities who join Fred in a Siblings Anonymous therapy circle. Kids won't have a clue.

There are laughs here, but "Fred Claus" has long stretches of airless, stifling material, and the movie creaks toward two hours as it tries to wedge in every star's allotted time.

I'm a Vaughn fan, but this is a revamped Santa movie that had me nostalgic for Tim Allen. *

Produced by Joel Silver, David Dobkin and Jesse Nelson, directed by David Dobkin, written by Dan Fogelman, music by Christophe Beck, distributed by Warner Bros.