My wife and I will watch any old Christmas related rubbish at this time of year and this fairly sappy, silly movie certainly fits that category. Steve Guttenburg, looking like Will "Elf" Ferrell's kid brother, stars and generally gets to goof around as Santa Claus's son, Nicholas naturally, charged by his father to find a wife to settle down with and take with him to Lapland for the rest of her days. Tracked and urged on by Santa's rather dour little helper, he saves the life of an unbelieving single-mum workaholic advertising executive career woman, played by Crystal Bernard. Rather conveniently, she's recently widowed and bringing up her young son alone, but before you can say "A partridge in a pear tree", encouraged by her young son, the two gradually come together as a couple but can they do so by the deadline of Christmas Day? Well, what do you think?!
The plot as you can tell borrows from "Elf" but with even more schmaltz and sentimentality with the kid son looking conveniently like a brother of MacAulay Culkin. The comedy is very mild and obviously family-oriented but you can't believe in the wholesome winsomeness of Guttenburg and Barnard, the former only identifying us as to his true identity by giving it "Ho Ho Ho" any chance he can get. I did like the touch of Claus Jr making like a universal translator for the oration of a store Santa for a variety of different nationalities, but in the end the Chrstmas pudding is over-egged and over-syruped to the point that your teeth may fall out just watching it.
