Director: James Orr
Cast: Patrick Swayze, Matthew Knight, Chris Kattan, Cameron Bright, Tim Curry

It's getting to be that time of year again, and you know what that means - mass commercialization of a spiritual holiday, the holiday in question being of course Christmas. No doubt you know the hundreds of ways the birth of mankind's savior can be exploited for personal gain, but since this is a movie-related website, the one way that Christmas is exploited that I want to focus on is with the motion picture. As you no doubt also know, there have been hundreds of Christmas-themed movies made in order to get some of that valuable holiday lucre. In fairness, I need to admit that some of these movies have become classics, and with every new Christmas season they are brought back to screens to very receptive audiences. It's certainly tough to make a Christmas classic, and the question that comes up is what filmmakers can do to increase their chance of making a Christmas-themed movie that hits home for audiences year after year and decade after decade. Looking back at my knowledge of Christmas movies - both ones that are classics and others that are mediocre or downright failures - I've determined some factors that can go a long way to making the overall package appealing. Two of the prime factors seem to be not only characters in the movie you can identify with, but themes in the movie that you can identify with. For example, in It's A Wonderful Life, the central figure of George Bailey was more or less an everyman with no great abilities, albeit one who struggled to make life good for both his family and his friends in Bedford Falls. Who couldn't identify with all that? In How The Grinch Stole Christmas (the original animated special), the character of the Grinch was someone who initially despised Christmas - and face it, for most of us, there's a small part of us that despises what the holiday brings each year. Neverless, by the end of the special, the Grinch had his personality completely changed, and in a positive way. Not only that, he learned how to not be an outsider from society... and just about anyone wants to be accepted by their society.

There are probably a lot more vital factors that can make a Christmas movie into a beloved classic or not, but I want to just talk about one more factor that I've determined after a lot of thought. While good characters and themes in the particular Christmas movie being considered are important, I also think that the setting of the movie is important as well. There is an obvious reason why so many classic Christmas movies are set in small towns, like It's A Wonderful Life. The low-key settings can help to build and maintain an intimate atmosphere, and from there it can be easy to sell to the audience the values the movie has. On the other hand, big cities have been successfully used at times as settings for classic Christmas movies; take the classic Miracle On 34th Street, for example, which was set in New York City. But with big city settings, I do think a lot more care is needed to make the movie a Christmas classic. Take the debate about the Bruce Willis action movie Die Hard, which in recent years has provoked a lot of debate as to whether it can be considered a Christmas movie or not. Having seen the movie and thought about it a lot, I have concluded that it's not a Christmas movie. True, the movie has a central protagonist that's a kind of everyman that you can identify with to a degree, and the theme of the movie - killing bloodthirsty terrorists in every bloodthirsty way that you can think of - is one that practically anyone could identify with. But the Nakatomi Plaza setting wasn't one that was portrayed in a way that exuded a "Christmas" feeling to the audience, despite the occasional shots of Christmas trees and tinsel. Don't get me wrong, the movie as it is is very good, an action classic, but I just don't think it can be considered a Christmas movie mainly due to its setting, and the presentation of this setting.

On the other hand, had the setting of Die Hard been more "Christmasy", it could have severely distracted the presentation of the slam-bang action. But I guess we'll never know for sure. Anyway, I will say this to the thousands of screenwriters out there who dream of writing a classic Christmas movie: Take the setting into consideration. While the theory may be that any setting has potential, not only are some settings harder to write for, some settings might turn off potential audiences from giving the movie a chance. That's sort of what I was thinking when I first learned about Christmas In Wonderland, because from its plot description it listed a setting that had me thinking, "That doesn't sound like a very Christmasy setting." Still, there were other factors about the movie that got me curious enough to sit down and watch it. The events of the movie center around the Saunders family, made up of patriarch Wayne (Patrick Swayze, Dirty Dancing), matriarch Judy (Rachael Hayward, Harsh Realm) young teen Danny (Cameron Bright, The Twilight Saga movies), pre-teen Brian (Matthew Knight, The Grudge 2), and the very young Mary (Amy and Zoe Schlagel). Just days earlier, the Saunders family, temporarily without Judy, had moved from California to the city of Edmonton in the Canadian province of Alberta for a new life, but things did not work out, the main reason being that Wayne was laid from his new job before it had a chance to start. Danny, roped into being a babysitter for his siblings, accompanies Wayne to the famous West Edmonton Mall. At the same time, two criminals named Leonard (Chris Kattan, Saturday Night Live) and Sheldon (Preston Lacy, Grind) are at the mall with a bag of counterfeit money that they are planning to exchange for real currency, but due to their ineptness, they lose the bag of counterfeit money. The bag is found by Mary, who naturally goes nuts over her find, and with her brother Brian starts to go on a spending spree in the mall. The burglars' contact, one Ginger Peachum (Carmen Electra, Scary Movie), isn't happy that the money has been lost, and soon all three criminals are pursuing Mary and Brian.  A complicated situation, one that soon gets worse when RCMP officer Gordon (Tim Curry, The Rocky Horror Picture Show), who is at the mall investigating the sudden appearance of counterfeit money, suspects the Saunders family of being behind the counterfeit money ring.

Since I am Canadian, it may not be a surprise that I've personally been to Edmonton - twice. And I had an opportunity to visit the West Edmonton Mall, which happens to be the fourteenth largest shopping mall in the world. While I can report that Edmonton is a nice city, and the West Edmonton Mall is a fairly cool place to visit, what I can't report is that both locations are a good setting for the Christmas-themed movie Christmas In Wonderland. Though in fairness to both locations, the lack of Christmas atmosphere is almost entirely due to the extreme ineptness of the people who made this movie. The first sign of the filmmakers' cluelessness is that while the movie takes place in Edmonton on December 24th, there is NO SNOW to be seen anywhere until the final sequence. While Canadian west coast cities like Vancouver or Victoria do frequently get little to no snow in the winter, Edmonton not having any snow by December 24th is absolutely ludicrous. True, the bulk of the movie takes place inside the West Edmonton Mall, which limits the opportunity to show snow, but director James Orr (Mr. Destiny) simply fails in every way to make this grand location seem magical or wonderous, which would have built some strong Christmas spirit. Yes, you see Christmas trees and other holiday decor on occasion, but it comes across featureless backdrop decorations for some strange reason. Yes, there's an ice rink inside the mall, but the ice rink footage just seems generic and not that special. Yes, there are toy stores and other retail locations that while in real life would be a great place to window shop (or actual shop) and soak up the atmosphere, but in this film these locations look cheap, hastily set dressed, and not the least bit spectacular. You'll be hard pressed to get a Christmas feeling from this movie; with a rewrite that would only last for one or two hours at most, the movie could be changed to be taking place at any other location in at any other time of the year.

It should probably come as no surprise that with Christmas In Wonderland having almost no Christmas atmosphere to be found, director Orr is equally hopeless in adding punch in other areas of his direction. Despite this Canadian movie being a co-production with U.S. studio Yari Film Group (The Maiden Heist), and being deemed worthy of a theatrical release in Canada (which not a lot of Canadians went to, which shouldn't be a surprise), the entire enterprise looks really cheap, akin to what a direct-to-DVD movie of the period would have had. (Wait until you see the couple of instances of CGI.) What will probably strike viewers the most is how fatigued the entire enterprise comes across. Scene after scene seems to plop heavily in front of the audience, then slowly melt into nothingness until the next scene wearily takes place to do the same. Even the "wacky" moments, such as a chase between two motorbikes in the mall, don't have any energy to them, and we in the audience immediately want them to end so that the movie can resume the story, even if this story is agonizingly slow-moving. Part of the reason for the slowness is that the story is pretty much divided up evenly by the aforementioned main characters, which results not only the movie not having one solid storyline, but also resulting in characters throughout the movie made to disappear for long periods of time before eventually appearing again. And the slowness of the story in Christmas In Wonderland is made worse by a huge number of plot elements that are feeble and predictable at their best, and utterly moronic at their worst. This ranges from patriarch Wayne being utterly embarrassed when he goes to a lingerie store to choose a sexy gift for his wife (ha ha, never saw that before in a movie), to the fact that the entire mall adventure, with all its counterfeit money finding/spending/hiding plus the schemes of the Saunders family, villains and the police (there doesn't seem to be any real private security force at the fourteenth largest mall in the world, for some strange reason) somehow manages to all happen in the space of approximately two hours. Even kids will see the absurdity of the movie trying to pass off all these events in such a short span of time.

I used the words "feeble", "predictable", and "moronic" earlier to describe the plot elements in Christmas In Wonderland. Well, I think I can add the word "very" before all three of those adjectives, because the audience is asked to believe that the characters in the movie would allow the plot elements to get that way. Both adults and kids simply won't be able to identify with the characters, both by the way they are written and how they are acted. I guess it would be a little mean to seriously bash the cast members played by the youths - they're young at their acting craft, plus Canada doesn't exactly have a large number of child actors to call on during casting sessions. However, truth be told, they seem a little bored in their roles and not terribly enthusiastic, and they have no chemistry with each other or with any of the adults. It may be because their characters have a lack of common sense, even at a kiddie level, so they end up being hard to swallow. As it turns out, actor Patrick Swayze, who plays their father, also is definitely lacking spark. He seems both befuddled and worn down, maybe by the realization that his once A-list status has disappeared and he's now down to appearing in a low budget Canadian movie. Still, his performance gains a bit more respect than some of his co-stars. As the crooks Leonard and Sheldon (in case you are wondering, this movie was filmed just before The Big Bang Theory premiered), actors Chris Kattan and Preston Lacy are extremely embarrassing. They are essentially doing a tenth-rate Abbott and Costello impression with no grace or timing, or even with Bud and Lou's limited intelligence, and the only entertainment to come from them is wondering things like how they got to the mall without wearing any winter apparel. However, the prize for most embarrassment by an actor in this movie goes to Tim Curry. Though he couldn't help the idiotic writing of his character, which ranges from somehow thinking a father and his young children are running a counterfeit ring to being a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police when Edmonton has its own police force (just like the aforementioned cities of Vancouver and Victoria), Curry does have to shoulder most of the blame by overacting outrageously, one way being that his character sports a really heavy Scottish accent. (All I can think is that maybe Curry studied Canadian actor James Doohan for reference about how to play "Canadian", and copied Doohan's accent in Star Trek.) It's such a bad performance, that with the other bad performances in Christmas In Wonderland - and everything else bad about the movie - that this Christmas movie, one of the worst ever made - is indeed a movie that will make you wonder just what went wrong with making it.

(Posted December 4, 2025)