If you live in a country where Christmas is widely celebrated, and you're drawing oxygen, you've probably heard at least one person point out that "Santa" and "Satan" are made up of the same letters. Maybe it was your nosy evangelical neighbor. Maybe it was a kid at school. Maybe you saw something like the 2020 TV movie Letters To Satan Claus and went "Oh, I get it." It's an old bit. But if anyone is able to spruce the gag up, it's Peter and Bobby Farrelly, right? The team behind There's Something About Mary and Dumb And Dumber, the guys who built careers out of stretching silly jokes and sillier behavior into movie-length amusements. Surely they can take this simple bit, a piece of wordplay so simple that seven-year-olds have it figured out, and make something amusing out of it. In Dear Santa, the Farrelly brothers (Bobby directs, while Peter co-wrote the script with Ricky Blitt) use that wordplay as the hook of a simple question: What if a kid with dyslexia accidentally sent a letter to Satan instead of Santa?
In Dear Santa, the kid is Liam (Robert Timothy Smith), a sweet 11-year-old who's tired of his parents (Brianne Howey and Hayes MacArthur) fighting, and just wants to have a nice Christmas. So, despite his parents' concerns that he might be getting too old for the Santa thing, Liam writes a letter to the man up North, but accidentally addresses the envelope to "Satan." Why does he just write "Santa" instead of "Santa Claus"? Why doesn't his mother, who's there when he fills out the envelope, check the spelling of the child she knows has a learning disability? These are questions soon forgotten as the film presents a bevy of head-scratchers.
Mere hours after the letter hits the mailbox, Satan (Jack Black, channeling Wilford Brimley) arrives in Liam's bedroom, pretending to be Santa and explaining that, actually, all the things Liam's been taught about Christmas are nonsense. Santa doesn't bring gifts on Christmas morning, the fake Claus says. Instead, he'll grant Liam three wishes, anything he wants as long as it doesn't change history. The catch? If Liam actually goes through with all three wishes, the Devil will take his soul.
It's a genuinely interesting setup for the kind of stock holiday morality play so often trotted out this time of year. Dear Santa gets more interesting when Liam's best friend Gibby (Jaden Carson Baker) points out that something weird is going on, and Satan is forced to admit his charade. How would an 11-year-old boy, faced with such a dark bargain, contend with the idea of wishes that will make his mortal life better if it means his immortal soul is in danger? How does that translate to the rough world of middle school, where Liam is busy dealing with crushes, bullies, and the meanest English teacher the world has ever known? What's more, how does Satan navigate the bargain, knowing that he's taking such an innocent soul, rather than a more easily corruptible, malleable one?
These are questions that this film is not especially interested in answering with anything other than glancing mentions, and in a way that's fine. Dear Santa is a family Christmas comedy, a movie about a kid trying to balance the rough patches in his life with the enforced joy of the holiday season. It doesn't need to be a massive meditation on good, evil, and the weight of the human soul. It can just be fun! That's why Jack Black is here!
The problem is that Dear Santa doesn't seem all that interested in being that movie either. Farrelly and Blitt's script, which feels like someone chopped it up and remixed it at least once somewhere along the way, meanders between wild adventure (like a drawn-out concert sequence that lets Liam shine in front of his crush) and utter, unspeakable darkness (like the tragedy that recently befell Liam's family). It pushes into edgier, more traditional Farrelly brothers territory just for a moment, then pulls back into cutesy, stilted family fun the next. One moment encapsulates that seesaw tone perfectly: Satan offers a substitute for a swear word because, for some reason, he decides he shouldn't cuss around a kid, then just a few sentences later decides to swear anyway. Dear Santa is a movie at war with itself, constantly pushing and pulling between two or more contrasting vibes, never finding a balance and, worse, never feeling like it ever cared about a balance.
There is at least an effort to make things semi-cheery. The aforementioned concert sequence (featuring a special guest) plays well. When Dear Santa remembers it's a Christmas movie, the decorations and Yuletide cheer come through, and the cast all does their best with the strained material. Black in particular gives everything he's got to this dialogue, but feels constantly and regrettably restrained, a muzzled comedy beast begging to be unleashed upon his audience. It's hard not to feel the draw of a better version of this movie, one that started with its heart in the right place and simply faltered along the way.
But a little Christmas cheer and a lot of Jack Black mugging for the camera is not enough to salvage this mess. For all its potential, Dear Santa starts in a skid, fails to ever control it, and then crashes wildly in the third act, becoming a film that breaks its own clearly stated rules and that might even offend a few families watching along the way (and not because of the comedy). If Christmas movies can't be good, they can usually at least be pleasant distractions. Dear Santa is neither. It's a regrettable film, one that wasn't ever worth the wordplay that started it.
Director: Bobby Farrelly
Writer: Ricky Blitt, Peter Farrelly
Starring: Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Jason Alexander, Ben Stiller, Robert Timothy Smith
Release Date: November 25, 2024 (Paramount+)
