Majin Planet

The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (2006)

Santa Clause 3 is that movie where if your a kid you just have to love it. Most of the people who go to see this movie should already know what your in for. I have to say I am half way disappointed in the film and some what happy. Its a weird feeling to say the least. In most cases a movie with such a raw story, lack of character development and overall just lame jokes I normally would either not bother with or rip it a new you know what. However Santa Clause 3 is above that because it is a kids movie after all. If I you get anger over it your just not really looking at the facts. Which is simply this: its a Santa Clause movie!!

So now that we have the intro out of the way lets dig into what this story is all about. We start off at the north pole where Santa (played once again by Tim Allen) as aways is getting ready for Christmas. What makes this year even more so crazy is that Mrs. Clause (Elizabeth Mitchell) is going to have a baby. She also is a bit stretch between the life she gave up and the new life she has (living around elf’s who are about all but 4 feet tall. A number of times she lets out hints that she wants to talk to someone tall, this brings Santa to bring the in-laws down for a visit. Because of fear that they would tell everyone about the north pole they Santa decided to turn the North Pole into a really bad Canada town, which if you have ever been to Canada you would just wonder away at this point.

But the fun doesn’t end here folks, it gets even more crazy as if having a wife who is torn between her new life and past life we have Jack Frost (played by Martin Short) who by order of the council is to be remove due to the fact that he try to upstage Santa Clause. He’s cold, he funny at times, not what I would label the biggest super bad guy on the block. When you look right at it you have to feel bad for the guy as he wants to be the one in the spot light but when it comes right down to it no one cares. I thought it was a bit silly to say the least that they set the character of Jack Frost to be one that lot of people don’t know about it. They even went as far as to have Lucy Miller (Liliana Mumy) tell Jack Frost that she never heard of him before.

In the wild and crazy events that follow, Santa Decided to keep Frost on the council but he has to help out around the workshop. This is where it beings as threw out the movie Frost goes around causing things to break using his “cold breath” to freeze stuff. In the mean time, Santa heads back home to get the in-laws only to end up not only bring Lucy but his ex-wife Laura Miller (Wendy Crewson) and her husband Neil Miller (Judge Reinhold). Both of which are not a big part of the movie as they where in the first two.

Along the way, Charlie comes to help out as well but only to be taken down to a small role. As this story is really about how Frost wants to become Santa, but how? He learns of the Escape Clause which just so happens to be one way for a Santa to stop being Santa if he chooses to be by taking his Christmas Global, holding it while saying I wish I wasn’t Santa anymore. With some tricks and causing problems in the workshop, Santa loses it to a point where you think everything is going to be ruined, but little did he know and poof, Frost tricks him into using the Escape Clause and off we go back to the scene in the first film where Santa Clause fell off the roof, I have to say some good editing work was done here as you almost can’t tell that they used the old footage cut with new Footage. I also thought it was funny that Frost pops Santa right in the face.

As you can guess Frost becomes Santa and of all things turn the north pole into a park where people come to him over him coming to them on Christmas. Its a total nightmare for Scott as he watches how his life was destroyed. With the help of Lucy he in turn gets everything back to normal.

Overall this was a fun film if your into this kind of stuff and even on the level it could have been better, but for reasons to keep it rate G and to the point I guess this was the best that the writers and director Michael Lembeck could come up with. After all the movie is only 98 mins long which by my standard wasn’t to long and wasn’t too short. I thought the movie was fun while it got a bit boring at times, it had some good jokes, even if they get old really quick. The only down side I see in this is that if the movie isn’t rush out in a month and on DVD, you wont get a DVD release until next year around this time. Generally any holiday film released around this time of the year aren’t released until the same time the following year. So if you want to see this movie, I recommend to just go spend the 7 bucks now because by next year you wont care very much unless you have kids, then chances are you already saw this movie, plan on seeing it and/or will be getting it on DVD once it comes out. If anything else the outtakes at the end was the highlight of the night, and was worth it. Again take the movie for what it is, even know not special or anything, but worth it just to get you into the holiday spirit of things.