Saving Santa (2013)

Saving Santa exists in that strange corner of the Christmas movie market where the cast is genuinely impressive and the film around them is genuinely not. Martin Freeman, Tim Curry, Joan Collins, Pam Ferris, Noel Clarke, Tim Conway. That's a lineup. Then you watch the movie and start to understand why it premiered as a Walmart exclusive on November 1, 2013, which is perhaps the most deflating sentence in the history of holiday entertainment.

What Saving Santa Is Actually About

Freeman voices Bernard D. Elf, a lowly stable hand at the North Pole who harbors ambitions of becoming an inventor. He's curious, well-meaning, and thoroughly overlooked by everyone around him. When a villain named Neville Baddington, voiced by Tim Curry with maximum relish, launches an assault on the North Pole to expose Santa's secrets to the world, Bernard discovers that Santa's sleigh contains a TimeGlobe, a device that allows time travel. Bernard uses it to go back and stop the attack. Then he goes back again. The film is, structurally, a zero-to-hero story threaded through a low-stakes time loop.

The plot is thin but functional. The real problem is that the script, written by Ricky Roxburgh from a story by producer Tony Nottage, doesn't find much to do with the time travel beyond the bare mechanics of the premise. Bernard goes back twice and the film doesn't fully exploit either trip for comedy or tension. The whole enterprise has the feeling of a story that was outlined on an index card and then filmed from the index card.

The Cast vs. the Animation

There's a genuine mismatch at the center of Saving Santa. The voice performances are, by any fair measure, better than the film deserves.

Freeman brings his full Bilbo Baggins warmth to Bernard, and it works. He plays the everyman elf with the same slightly-baffled-but-earnest quality that made him a reliable comedic and dramatic lead throughout his career. The problem is that the script doesn't give Bernard enough dimension. He's curious, then scared, then brave. That's the whole arc. Freeman delivers it well; there's just not much to deliver.

Curry, though, is another matter. His Neville Baddington is the best thing in the film by a significant margin. The name alone ("Neville Baddington") tells you everything about the tone Curry is working in, and he commits completely. He makes Baddington smarmy, theatrical, and oddly specific in his menace. Tim Curry voicing a Christmas terrorist in a direct-to-video children's animation is the kind of casting decision that raises more questions than it answers, but the performance itself is flawless.

Joan Collins as Baddington's domineering mother Vera gets less to do but is clearly having fun. Tim Conway's Santa is gentle and sweet, though underwritten. Pam Ferris and Noel Clarke round out a cast that collectively deserved a better production surrounding them.

The Animation Problem

Prana Studios handled the CGI, working from their Mumbai facility. By 2013, Prana had done solid work on Disney's Tinker Bell franchise and contributed visual effects to films like Thor: The Dark World. Saving Santa does not represent their best work. The character models are stiff, the environments are flat, and the whole film carries the visual weight of a mid-2000s video game cutscene rather than a 2013 theatrical-quality release. This was a £5 million production, which explains some of it, but other films have done considerably more with comparable budgets.

The Christmas setting, which should be Saving Santa's biggest visual asset, is squandered. The North Pole is generic. The interiors are dull. There is nothing here that a child would stop to look at the way a child stops to look at Pixar snow or DreamWorks lighting. The film was released in 3D in some markets, which suggests someone involved believed the animation could support the format.

The Musical Numbers

Saving Santa includes original songs, scored by composer Grant Olding. Freeman gets a showstopper at the opening. The songs are earnest and serviceable, and "Some Kind of Miracle" has the structural bones of a proper Christmas ballad. None of them are memorable past the credits. This is not a Frozen situation. You will not find yourself humming anything on the drive home.

The best thing to say about the music is that it doesn't get in the way. The worst thing is that it doesn't add much either.

The Verdict

Saving Santa is not a disaster. It is watchable, inoffensive, and at 83 minutes it moves quickly enough that you won't feel cheated by the time. For very young children who haven't yet developed taste in animation quality, it's adequate holiday viewing. Martin Freeman is likeable, Tim Curry is tremendous, and the basic Christmas rescue plot delivers what it promises.

But the film is a clear example of what happens when an ambitious premise and a talented cast meet a production that ran out of either time, money, or both. Somewhere in Saving Santa there is a better film trying to exist. Neville Baddington keeps glimpsing it.