CANDY CANE LANE - Mark Reviews Movies

Candy Cane Lane, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 30, 2023

Adapting the most repetitive and irritating of Christmas songs into a feature-length movie could be an act of either bravery or folly. We'll call it the latter in the case of Candy Cane Lane, which takes "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and turns it into a formulaic and, yes, repetitive story about a family bonding over a fantastical adventure during the holiday season. The best that can be said of Kelly Younger's screenplay is that it's at least slightly less annoying than the tune that serves as its inspiration, although that's not saying much.

The movie stars Eddie Murphy as Chris Carver, a man obsessed with Christmas, and it's a good thing Murphy remains naturally charming and has been in worse movies than this one. Otherwise, his mostly bored presence here might have been a low point instead of simply being as forgettable as the material.

Initially, the plot has Chris, who's laid off from his job only days before the holiday, desperate to win his neighborhood's annual Christmas decoration contest. This year, the grand prize is $100,000 (There's an asterisk after the amount, but no one thinks to ask why), and even though his wife Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross, a good sport and pretty funny here) is in the running for a promotion at her work, the family could really use the money at this point (Their lavish house suggests otherwise, but hey, it's the movies).

With his neighbors buying out the stock of decorations at every store in town, Chris and his youngest daughter Holly (Madison Thomas)—the other two are Joy (Genneya Walton) and Nick (Thaddeus J. Mixson)—find themselves at a mysterious "pop-up" shop underneath a highway overpass. It's run by Pepper (Jillian Bell), a mischievous proprietor who sells Chris an elaborate, animated tree that represents the song about those 12 days of gifts. The receipt he signs to complete the purchase, though, is long and full of a lot of fine print, and yes, that means Chris has basically signed over his life to this puckish saleswoman, who, as it turns out, transforms her customers into little figurines and imprisons them in a miniature Christmas village. This cannot be a sound financial arrangement for the shop.

Anyway, the real plot has Chris frantically searching for gold rings, being held by the whole cast of characters and animals from the song—since they're magically released from the tree after he puts it up in his front yard. If anything, director Reginald Hudlin's movie serves as an amusing reminder of just how many and many different types of birds there are in that song.

There's the partridge, of course, which is made of gold and has creepy red eyes. There are those hens, which we know are French because they wear white shirts with black stripes and berets, and the geese fire eggs at Carol while she's on her way to work. The visual effects here are about as cheap as the puns, which also include a parrot that makes eerie, vaguely threatening phone calls to Chris—because "calling birds."

Beyond the birds, the other key visual effect is the presentation of those living figurines—voiced by Nick Offerman (doing an 'orrible Cockney accent), Chris Redd, and Robin Thede. One's appreciation of these characters will likely depend on how much admiration one has for the animators making the digital figures look as if they're animated by stop-motion methods, because there's not much to them (A group of carolers, who can't help but to complete lyrics to Christmas songs when anyone even accidentally starts them, is a decent gag).

At least the leaping lords and a milking maid are played by actual people, although the chase/fight scene at the high school's football stadium is a good example of how the filmmakers rely on chaos to keep us from thinking about how routine the enterprise is and how limited its imagination is. A climactic battle/hunt for gold rings on the block of the Carvers' home is just a lot of frantic movement and noise (plus some of those most festive of traditions of the season: contractual stipulations and basic algebra). It's too bad, really, considering the appearance of a Santa played by an actor who probably could have had some fun in the role—in a different movie that actually cared about having fun.

This is pretty bad, to be sure, but if there's a mildly saving grace to Candy Cane Lane, it's that the movie is good-natured—and a bit too syrupy, with a digital character, voiced by an actor clearly disinterested in a recording booth, offering the big final message—and certainly believes this is entertaining. People sometimes grow out such false beliefs, of course, so maybe a hinted-at next entry could benefit from that.

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