Let’s get one thing straight from the jump: I am a shameless mark for Christmas movies. I love ’em, and I don’t just mean the usual rotation of basic-cable classics that make the rounds this time of year. I mean that if your movie is covered in Christmas decorations and involves some basic notion of holiday cheer and overcoming dubious odds to learn the true meaning of the season, I’m in. It’s my blessing and my curse.
But even I am aware enough to understand that there are two kinds of Christmas movies: The Ones You Watch and The Ones You Have On. Everyone’s standards for what fits into these categories varies, but you know it when you see it. It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Elf… these are movies you settle in to enjoy, at least for the first time in any given season. Then there’s whatever else just happens to be on cable or the homepage of your friendly neighborhood streaming service. You’re not really watching it, but it’s covered in lights and garlands and there are pleasant enough people on the screen, so it’s there while you’re hanging lights or folding laundry.
Which brings us to Candy Cane Lane, the new holiday comedy from director Reginald Hudlin, starring Eddie Murphy in the classic role of Christmas Dad Who Loses Sight of What’s Important. Everything about it is pleasant enough, from the cast of stars to the decorations to the promise of gentle, family-friendly comedy all geared toward an inevitable happy ending. But the emphasis belongs on “enough,” and that’s the problem. For all its grand seasonal trappings, this is a film that plays like it was tailor-made as background noise for the Christmas season. It’s a Christmas Movie You Have On, and coming from a major comedy star and a respected filmmaker, that can’t help but be a letdown.
Murphy is Chris Carver, whose name is Chris Carver because it’s a Christmas movie and he likes to make his own decorations out of wood, so he’s a Christmas Carver. Will this movie get any more subtle along the way? No it will not, because Chris has a wife named Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross) and his youngest daughter is named Holly (Madison Thomas). In case you didn’t get it yet, the Carvers are Christmas People.
Which is good, because the Carvers live on a whole street of Christmas People, a street so attuned to the holiday that it hosts an annual house decorating contest big enough to be broadcast by a local L.A. cable station. But this year, the stakes are higher. A prize of $100,000 is at stake, Chris just got laid off from his job, and he sees winning Candy Cane Lane as the key to unlocking a better holiday, and a better future, for his family. Luckily for him, a new Christmas store just opened up, run by a mysterious woman named Pepper (Jillian Bell), who promises him the best decorations in town if he just signs the receipt. Naturally, Chris signs and gets his prize-winning décor. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it turns out Pepper is actually an evil magical Christmas Elf determined to punish naughty people like Chris (whose crime was…trying to win a contest, I guess?), and the deal for his 12 Days of Christmas-themed decorations is rigged in her favor. Chris barely has time to get the decorations home before they vanish, sending him on a hunt around town for the fabled Golden Rings, because if he doesn’t collect them, he’ll be turned into a porcelain Christmas village figurine on Christmas Eve.
This is a lot of plot for a Christmas movie, and I’m not even covering everything that unfolds after all this setup. The script, by Kelly Younger, is dense with this stuff, so layered with new wrinkles to the mythology and side quests for its characters that it makes The Santa Clause look minimalist. Still, you understand the basic scaffolding here, because you’ve seen a Christmas movie before: Chris goes off on a wild goose chase (literally, because there are Six Geese a-Laying in this movie) to get the rings, loses sight of what’s important, and must re-learn the true meaning of Christmas in order to save himself and his family.
Familiarity is fine; the movie shares its basic ideas with at least 60% of all holiday films. But all that plot never actually drives much in the way of character development or real story. We like Chris because we like Eddie Murphy, and we like Carol because we like Tracee Ellis Ross. We understand their plight because we’ve seen these movies before, and… well, that’s pretty much it. That’s a shame, because a guy who hand-carves Christmas decorations in a Big Box Store world could be actively compelling if we spent any time in Chris’s little workshop. Instead, he has to go hunt for Golden Rings like he’s Sonic the Hedgehog (a joke, to its credit, that the movie actually makes).
The goal with the ring hunt is, obviously, to layer setpieces and big, broad comedy brushstrokes onto this canvas, an understandable goal in an age when streamers have to keep people from hitting the Back button and watching something else. The trouble is, everything interesting about Candy Cane Lane is set up in the opening act, before things go all magical and strange. Due respect to Bell, who channels Ursula the Sea Witch by way of the North Pole to play Pepper, but once she shows up, the movie just becomes a list of scenes all designed to get to a predictable end. A family man laid off at the holidays, looking for the one thing that could make him feel like he belongs again? That’s interesting. A guy running around trying to grab a golden ring from around the neck of a French hen is just noise. The ingredients of Candy Cane Lane are there, bright and shiny. Murphy and Ross don’t come across as bored, and Bell loses none of her scene-stealing power. Everyone seems like they’re genuinely having fun, but they’re trapped in a less interesting movie than the one they could have made, the one just out of frame.
All of which means that if you pay a little too much attention to Candy Cane Lane, it crumbles in your hands like a dried-out Christmas cookie that was maybe once warm and delicious. Better to not pay attention, just throw it on the TV while you’re wrapping gifts, and let its general Christmassy air lull you. After all, that’s what it was made for.
Director: Reginald Hudlin
Writer: Kelly Younger
Starring: Eddie Murphy, Tracee Ellis Ross, Jillian Bell, Genneya Walton, Madison Thomas, Thaddeus J. Mixson
Release Date: December 1, 2023
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.