Fatman (2020)

Fatman opens with a shot of Mel Gibson's Santa Claus, here called Chris Cringle, feeding horses on a snow-covered ranch in Alaska. He looks tired. He looks old. He's carrying a rifle. Within minutes, a spoiled 12-year-old named Billy Wenan receives a lump of coal in his Christmas stocking and responds by hiring a professional assassin to kill Santa. That is the premise of the 2020 film directed by brothers Eshom and Ian Nelms, and it is played almost entirely straight.

This is not a parody. It's not a winking comedy. Fatman occupies a strange, lonely corner of Christmas cinema where the absurd meets the deadpan, and the film refuses to apologize for any of it.

Mel Gibson as a Grizzled, Government-Subsidized Santa

Gibson's Chris Cringle lives modestly. His workshop employs a squad of elves who produce toys on what appears to be a factory floor. His operation survives on a U.S. military contract, because apparently the government subsidizes Santa's gift production in exchange for manufacturing fighter jet components. The film presents this without irony. Chris signs the paperwork, grumbles about budget cuts, and goes back to work.

Gibson brings something genuinely interesting to the role. He plays Santa as a blue-collar worker nearing retirement who has watched the world's children get worse year after year. The naughty list is growing. Fewer children deserve presents. His funding is getting slashed. He's drinking more. His marriage to Ruth (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, quietly excellent) is one of the few warm things in the film, and Jean-Baptiste grounds every scene she's in with understated affection.

The performance works because Gibson doesn't play it for laughs. He plays it like a man who has been doing a thankless job for centuries and is running out of reasons to continue.

Walton Goggins as the Skinny Man

On the other end of the narrative, Walton Goggins plays a hitman known only as "Skinny Man." He's been hired by Billy, a sociopathic child who treats the assassination of Santa Claus as a business transaction. Goggins is the best thing in the movie. He plays the role with a calm, reptilian focus that suggests a man who has been waiting his entire career for this particular contract.

The Skinny Man has his own grudge against Santa. As a child, he also received coal, and the memory has festered into something clinical and personal. Goggins sells this backstory through small physical choices: the way he handles a childhood ornament, the way he studies a Santa figurine in a diner. He doesn't chew scenery. He dissects it.

The film crosscuts between Gibson's ranch and Goggins' methodical pursuit, and these two parallel tracks give Fatman a rhythm that feels more like a Coen brothers thriller than a holiday movie.

Is Fatman a Christmas Movie?

Yes, but not in any conventional sense. The film takes the mythology of Santa Claus completely seriously. Chris Cringle is immortal. He has a magical sleigh. His elves are real. Children receive real coal or real gifts based on their behavior. The naughty-or-nice system is treated as a verifiable fact of the world, not a metaphor.

But the film surrounds this mythology with the texture of rural American decline. Chris's operation is failing financially. The government is cutting his subsidies. The elves are demoralized. The tone is closer to a small-town economic drama than a Christmas fantasy. Think of it as a Christmasified version of a story about a family farm being squeezed out by federal budget politics.

What Works and What Doesn't

The Nelms brothers have a strong eye for composition. The Alaskan landscape is shot with a cold beauty that reinforces the film's melancholy. The pacing is deliberate, almost too deliberate. At 100 minutes, Fatman sometimes feels like it's taking a long walk through the snow to reach a destination you can already see.

Billy, the bratty kid who sets the plot in motion, is the film's weakest element. Chance Hurstfield plays him as a one-note sociopath, and the script doesn't give him enough texture to make his villainy interesting. He's a plot device in a school uniform.

The climax, when Goggins finally reaches the ranch, delivers the confrontation the film has been building toward. It's violent, messy, and surprisingly emotional. Gibson and Goggins share only a few minutes of screen time together, but the buildup makes it count. The final image is both bleak and oddly hopeful, which is about as close to a Christmas miracle as this film gets.

A Cult Christmas Film That Found Its Audience

Fatman was released in October 2020 to mixed reviews and almost no theatrical audience, earning just $1.6 million against a $20 million budget. COVID-era distribution didn't help. But the film found a second life on streaming and physical media, developing the kind of devoted cult following that sustains midnight screenings and Reddit threads.

Its appeal makes sense. Fatman fills a specific niche: for viewers who want a Christmas movie that takes Santa seriously but refuses to be sentimental about it. It sits alongside Rare Exports and Violent Night in a small but growing subgenre of films that treat Santa Claus as a figure worth interrogating rather than simply celebrating. Gibson's weary, weathered performance anchors it, and Goggins elevates every scene he's in. The film is flawed, uneven, and genuinely unlike anything else in the Christmas canon.