Call Me Claus (2001)

It’s almost a month since Xmas and yet it’s taken us until now to get round to watching the one Xmas movie we recorded over the festive period. The main draw for Call Me Claus was the knowledge that Whoopi Goldberg starred in it, and the Radio Times gave it a good review.

The film was a TV movie, and it showed. Whoopi plays quite a grumpy character, who is inexplicably chosen by Nigel Hawthorne’s Santa Claus to take on the red suit when his 200 year tenure expires. Hawthorne is lovely as the elderly Claus, and it’s a sad irony this was his last role before he died, just days after the movie premiered in America. Santa is a much more sympathetic character than Whoopi’s TV shopping channel producer. The best of the movie is in the last third when Whoopi is allowed a bit more free rein, and thus injects more humour into the pretty predictable plot.

It was a good holiday movie – I probably would have enjoyed it more when I was in the festive spirit though.