I thought I had this movie pegged. The poster said it all, I figured: the evangelical former teen idol Kirk Cameron at the center, in a Chuck Norris-like pose, wielding a candy cane like a sword and protecting a snow globe as if it were the baby Jesus himself. The tagline, "Put Christ back in Christmas," suggests a full-on acceptance of our declaration of War on Christmas, and that Kirk will be there to meet us on the front lines. Watch out, liberals and atheists, 'cuz evangelicals are coming to kick your ass!
I embarked upon this 80-minute film ready to get served a lesson in the True Meaning of Christmas. But then the movie dug into its plot, and... well, I was humbled to find that I wasn't in the movie's crosshair at all. It isn't even a straw-man attack on secularism so that evangelical audiences can cheer on the defeat of those who would insist on "Happy Holidays" in every store. Though there's lip service paid to the "wet blankets" who don't want Christians to celebrate "too loudly," Cameron surprisingly aims to the right rather than to the left. It's targeted at people who think Christmas needs to be more pure, more religious, more centered on Jesus. Kirk positions himself as the liberal reformer, who's here to tell those stiffly stiffersons to lighten up: that all the decorating, singing, celebrating, gift-buying, and ho-ho-ho-ing is perfectly okay!
After a five-minute introduction featuring Cameron himself sitting in front of a Christmas tree musing about what Christmas means to him and sipping from what I'm pretty sure is an empty cup of cocoa, we go to a lavish Christmas party hosted by Kirk's sister (played by his real life sister--Bridgette, not Candace). Kirk learns from his sister (she's billed only as Kirk's sister) that her husband, Christian White (the symbolism here is about as subtle as a brick), has been struggling with Christmas lately.
Rather than join in the celebration, Christian (played by the film's co-writer/director, Darren Doane) has elected to sit in his car and stew. Kirk goes out to sit with him to try to bring him out of his Scrooge attitude. Christian explains that he can't shake his skepticism about Christmas. How does our celebration of Christmas represent the Christian faith at all? Wouldn't the more Christian thing be to take all the money we spend on presents and trees and decorations and use it to feed poor children?
A question that leads even the most liberal among us to think: well, yeah, wouldn't it be? Nah, I guess not, and the prospect of all those starving kids doesn't seem to bother Kirk a lot, since he listens to Christian's fairly legitimate quibbles with an unending smug grin, as if he's just waiting to deliver him a yuletide smackdown.
He never really answers the question about the poor children. Instead, Kirk deters the conversation to an absolutely befuddling thesis on Jesus's swaddling clothes in the manger, the relevance of which I'm still attempting to grasp.
It's around this point that we realize that the entire movie is going to be made up of Kirk and this guy sitting in a car talking. Kirk essentially runs through every element of Christmas celebration that has a pagan or secular origin and explains that, see, it's Christian after all. The Christmas tree hearkens back not to the winter solstice but to the tree of knowledge from Genesis. The act of material gift giving isn't materialistic at all; it's a representation of God's spirit being made material in the form of Jesus, get it? And most ridiculously at all, the shape of the presents under the tree really seems to resemble the cityscape of Bethlehem!
Cameron, Doane, and crew must have realized soon into production that their car conversation wasn't enough to sustain a feature film, as most of the actors seem to have been directed to milk every beat for as long as they can. The movie's barely an hour long if you take out Kirk's long introduction and the interminable final dance number, followed by a "credit cookie" outtake sequence that, if it isn't hilarious, is at least loose and goofy enough to show that the movie was made by human beings and not robots.
There's little plot to speak of, though the monotony of Cameron's feature-length lecture is broken up slightly by the appearance of two Happenin' Black Dudes who occasionally converse about being restricted from celebrating Christmas. It culminates in one of them delivering an off-the-cuff beat poem presenting a litany of conspiracy theories; it's here, I think, that the filmmakers mean to downplay the whole "War on Christmas" thing as kinda silly, which is commendable, though if you listen closely, the dialogue seems to equate fears of the Koch Brothers and Citizens United with 9/11 truthers and chem trail watchers.
The movie isn't completely unwatchable; it appears to have been made with a modicum of production value. Cameron has a completely vapid screen presence, though Doane has a certain lumpy charm as the Scrooge character. And though the movie is patently offensive, both logically and religiously, it is effective as a crass curiosity: here is, from the country's most prominent right-wing straight-arrow devout Christian, a defense of tacky materialism in the name of Jesus. It's okay to get gaudy on Christmas; it's a little disingenuous to say the Bible told you to.
* out of ****
P.S. I didn't mention the "Game of Thrones"-style Santa Claus fight scene. It's not as much fun as it sounds.
