The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (G)
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Caution: spoilers.

This is the third movie in the Santa Clause franchise, following The Santa Clause 2. I went into this movie expecting not to like it, partly because it did so poorly with critics. And indeed, a lot of it was cringey. But in the end, I liked it more than the second film, and... I'm gonna rate it a bit lower than the first film, which itself I wasn't wild about, but to be honest I can't even say for sure that I liked the third film less than the first. Because I found part of it kind of fascinating.

It begins with Mrs. Claus teaching elves, but they're apparently not very interested in her lessons. One of them (played by Abigail Breslin, in a much too small role) asks her a question or something, I forget, but it results in Mrs. Claus telling her class a story, which forms the bulk of the movie. She was pregnant, and missing her parents, Bud (Alan Arkin) and Sylvia (Ann-Margret), so Scott decided to bring them to the North Pole for a visit. However, to keep his identity as Santa Claus a secret, he had his elves give the village a makeover to pretend it's Canada. And he got the Sandman (Michael Dorn) to put them to sleep for the whole sleigh-ride to the North Pole, and give them dreams of a normal plane flight. At the same time, Scott's sort-of niece, Lucy Miller, begged him to take her to the North Pole, since she'd never been there. He finally relented, and that meant letting her parents, Laura and Neil, come with them.

Meanwhile, Jack Frost (Martin Short) had been making some trouble, so the Council of Legendary Figures was going to punish him, but he convinced Scott to give him a second chance. This involved him working with the elves, but he ended up secretly causing a great deal of havoc in the workshop as well as with Scott's family. And he tricked the current head elf, Curtis, into revealing a secret that would let him replace Scott as Santa Claus. (I have to believe if Bernard were still around, he wouldn't have been fooled nearly so easily.) Then Frost tricked Scott into invoking the "escape clause", by wishing on a snow globe that he'd never become Santa at all. For awhile before that, I was wondering how the heck he would manage to do that, but I think it worked out almost believably. And that's when the movie went from basically cringe to actually fairly interesting. Scott and Frost were transported back to the night that Scott first became Santa, and Frost managed to do so himself. We then flash forward to the present, and get a glimpse of what Scott's life (as well as Laura and Neil's lives) would have been like if he hadn't become Santa (though he still remembers life as Santa, and wants to change things back to the original reality). The whole thing felt to me a little bit like It's a Wonderful Life, with the North Pole being converted into what Pottersville might have been like if Mr. Potter had been played by Martin Short. I enjoyed that. And I enjoyed how Scott ultimately managed to undo all the changes Frost had made, with help from Lucy.

Well, some more stuff happens, and eventually we get back to the classroom where Mrs. Claus was telling this whole story to her students, some time after having given birth to her and Scott's baby, Buddy Claus. That's pretty much it. I've left out some details, but that's basically the story. A lot of it was pretty "meh", and I was disappointed at just how small a fraction of the movie was set in the altered reality. There was far too much buildup to that, and it was resolved too quickly. I feel like the movie as a whole would have been a lot more interesting if we'd seen more of that reality. And I think the best part of the movie was Jack Frost, both when he was making mischief before the change and when he was living his best life in the alternate reality. Definitely a fun villain, like a (more) comedic Loki. But of course, as is so often the case, his idea of utopia was kind of a dystopia for everyone else (especially the elves, who clearly weren't happy about their new jobs as entertainers). So I'm glad Scott won in the end, even if his reality is kind of more boring than Frost's was. Scott definitely makes a better Santa than Frost did.

Followed by the web series "The Santa Clauses"