Eddie Murphy's 'Candy Cane Lane' is so bad it made me question my sanity.

You gotta taste this! It's revolting! On bad movies and the act of reviewing them.

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One of the great things about being just a guy with a newsletter and not “official film critic” from “established site” is that I no longer feel compelled to see every movie. I used to do that, obligated to provide a take on everything, simply because “that’s the job.” Often this meant seeing movies that looked bad or I had no interest in. I always went in hoping to be pleasantly surprised and considered it my special duty (and occasionally a special treat) to report back when I was.

More often, it didn’t pleasantly surprise me, and then I’d be forced into the mostly thankless task of explaining that a terrible-looking movie was exactly as bad as everyone probably already assumed. Every once in a while a movie would rise above Not For Me into Pissed Me Off territory for whatever reason, and then I’d take some glee in writing the takedown.

But by and large, I think “see everything because that’s the job” is sort of a weird, perverse relationship to have with movies. The best audience for art is probably the self-selecting audience of people who are most intrigued by it. (I feel for the critics out there who ended up liking Wonka, because it’s going to take an act of God or an especially long plane ride to get me to watch that pointless-looking hunk of shit). Of course, that’s a lot of onus to put on the marketing, and then what happens to movies that are much better than the premise? I’m not saying there’s an easy solution, just describing how it feels.

These days, I see movies if and when they look interesting to me. Hopefully without falling into easy hypberbole, this has achieved nothing short of rekindling my love of movies. It’s hard to tell whether this change in strategy has done the trick alone or if we’ve just gotten a wealth of bangers this year. In just the past few months alone I’ve seen Flower Moon, The Killer, Saltburn, and The Holdovers, all of which I loved, plus Napoleon, which I wouldn’t say I entirely loved but still enjoyed. And I still haven’t seen Priscilla, Next Goal Wins, Poor Things, American Fiction, or Maestro, all of which I want to. The end of the year movies are always better than the beginning, but even so: that’s an embarrassment of riches.

And yet here I am writing about Candy Cane Lane. How the fuck did that happen?

Well, my wife wanted to have a Christmas movie night, and my actual favorite Christmas movies — Bad Santa, The Holdovers — would probably not have been deemed appropriate for a 10-year-old and a 2-year-old, and I’ve seen all the other ones (Elf, A Christmas Story) 12 trillion times (I also remember The Night Before being great but it’s been a while). Meanwhile, Candy Cane Lane had a big display ad on the Prime Video page, and I could’ve sworn I saw a couple people I follow say it was okay, so it was an easy choice.

Let me tell you: It was not okay. In fact it’s only the sheer depth of how not-okay Candy Cane Lane was that inspired me to write this newsletter.

Isn’t it a Christmas movie, you might be asking? Didn’t I already assume it would be bad? Yes, and yes, to some extent (I used to get some version of a commenter asking “what did you expect, bro?” on every single review). So let me preface this by saying that I have seen bad Christmas movies. I even went on David J. Roth’s Hallmark movie podcast. I know the Christmas movie formula, and while it’s usually pretty bad, there’s also a comforting familiarity to it. It doesn’t tax your brain, and you can sort of alternately laugh at and get onboard with the corniness of it all. And isn’t that the true spirit of the holidays?

I absolutely could not do that with Candy Cane Lane. This movie was an almost perfectly even split between excruciatingly hack takes on expected material (two characters arguing over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, for instance) and absurd, utterly baffling high concept. Did I mention there’s also weird CGI? It was the opposite of relaxing, with no respite from either jokes so poorly-formed it was impossible not to brainstorm 10 alternatives, or trying to make sense of the bizarre plot. No laughs, no comfort, just groans and puzzlement.

Eddie Murphy plays Chris Carver, a father of three whose hand-carved wooden Christmas decorations keep losing the annual Christmas decorating contest to his neighbor, played by Ken Marino — Bruce, who always just crowds his yard with store-bought inflatable crap. Chris’s wife, Carol, (Tracee Ellis Ross) does business stuff, his daughter, Joy (Genneya Walton) is a track star who wants to go to Notre Dame even though both her parents are rabid USC fans, and his son, Nick (Thaddeus J. Mixon) is a tuba player who does bad in math because he wants to be a music producer. Yes, they’re all named after Christmas stuff, which they themselves only discover an hour into the movie (despite it being plainly obvious to us, who haven’t lived with those names our entire lives, in the first five minutes). There’s also younger daughter named Holly but who really cares.

Chris ends up getting fired from his job in plastics (?) by some new young hotshot boss played by Trevante Rhodes from Moonlight (!!!). Right around the same time, the neighborhood finds out that this year’s Christmas decorating contest will have a $100,000 grand prize, thanks to it being sponsored, for the first time ever, by a cable company, for reasons both asinine and unconvincing.

Heyyy, Chris just got fired and now his favorite contest has a $100k prize on the line?? With a neighbor feud angle and an inherent conflict between hand-made craftsmanship and flashy, mass-marketed crap? That sounds like the set up for a perfectly cromulent Christmas movie!

Only Candy Cane Lane pivots. Rather than making Chris’s introduced-in-the-first-scene hand-made Christmas decorations part of the plot (he’s also named “Carver” for fuck’s sake), he ends up taking a construction detour beneath some freeways one morning (the Carvers live in LA, remember, or El Segundo specifically) and ends up at a curiously elaborate Christmas store pop-up. The proprietress is a cryptic, possibly malevolent character called Pepper, played by Jillian Bell. With Pepper, as with every bit part in Candy Cane Lane, it’s kind of hard to tell when she’s giving plot and when she’s just sort of failing wildly at laugh lines no one bothered to write.

When Pepper has her back turned, the Carvers notice that the Christmas dolls in the store are alive. Rather than sit with this revelation for a second or two (you’d think realizing human souls trapped inside Christmas figurines was a thing would be a bit of a moment!), the dolls go straight into soy sitcom dialogue. Rather than take a beat to contextualize any of this, they all act like this will be all of their last chances to get laughs. You sense that these dolls are voiced by recognizable comedy people in a “look, hon, it’s a Wayans brother!” kind of way, only it doesn’t land because the actors we’re meant to recognize are trapped inside shiny stop-motion dolls. One of them is a chimney sweep in a top hat with possibly the world’s laziest attempt at a cockney accent, and you don’t find out until the film’s closing credits that it’s Nick Offerman. Was he cockney in life or was that just an imposition of his doll role? No idea, there is zero payoff.

The Carvers instead just sort of plow through buying stuff to win the decoration contest, including a giant, light up, wooden-and-animatronic mechanical Christmas tree celebrating the 12 Days Of Christmas, topped with a golden partridge. Pepper hands Chris a lengthy terms of service agreement he doesn’t read, and soon the Carvers are headed home with a massive sardine can-looking thing (housing the 12 Days of Christmas tree) strapped to the top of the car. At this point, the film has now shifted effortlessly into special FX-y stylized realism, like Gremlins meets a Nicholas Sparks movie.

Chris unveils the tree at the cacophonous decoration contest opening ceremony (presided over by a deliberately grating emcee who we’re told is an aspiring influencer and the news anchor’s nephew… you know what, it’s not important), and things are looking good for him to win the contest.

Only weird shit starts happening. The Carvers find their pool infested by swans. Carol (the mom) has her big business meeting sabotaged by CGI chickens in berets and turtlenecks (French hens… you get it). At which point she’s like, “Oh no! I’ll never get the big promotion if the brass finds out I’m being gang-stalked by mischievous fowl!”

Perhaps you sort of see where this is going. Basically, the world’s most baffling, 12-Days-of-Christmas-themed version of Small Soldiers, which was already an incredibly weird movie.

Chris finds out that unless he can collect all the golden rings before midnight on Christmas Eve, he’s going to have his soul trapped in a tiny plastic Christmas doll for all eternity. Meanwhile, he has to learn to accept his family for who they are — which is to say: a promising athlete who would rather attend Notre Dame than USC, and a tuba-playing music producer who doesn’t care about math. And he has to do it all while being menaced by weird CGI riffs on a song. It’s like they took seven competing ideas for Christmas movies and smashed them together in a Hadron collider. Then a first-year member of an improv troupe came in to punch it up with rough draft jokes and ill-fitting references.

It’s hard to overstate how bizarre this all is, and almost never in a good way. None of the randomness seems creative, because every character decision seems driven purely by the hacky logic of some new grab-bagged genre. At one point, Carol tells the family that the best way to collect all the rings is for everyone to say indoors. Joy disappoints a Notre Dame scout by having to javelin fight some evil lords in the middle of a track meet. Luckily she gets spotted by another track scout (from UNC) while fleeing CGI geese. The logic of this movie is such that a person’s first thought upon seeing a flock of geese firing down eggs like an A10 Warthog would be “gee, that girl’s fast!” (And no one would say that, because she runs like an actor).

Nick takes a detour running from his math teacher (played by Stephen Tobolowsky) to have a fully-stylized break dancing sequence, apropos of absolutely nothing. One of the figurines is horny for Chris’s wife. The Pentatonix make an appearance. Finally, Santa shows up, in the form of David Allen Greer driving a souped-up sky jetski to collect Pepper, who apparently is a rogue elf. What was Pepper’s motivation? Why did she like to imprison souls in Christmas plastic? Perhaps that was elf canon in some Christmas movie I missed, since this movie mostly does feel like a collection of slant references with no internal logic.

It all adds up to a movie experience so mystifying I thought I was disassociating. I had to take a walk outside afterwards. Even stranger, it was allegedly directed by Reginald Hudlin, who has some underrated classics in his filmography, like House Party and the Great White Hype. It’s an experience I can’t recommend but that I’m desperate to share, in the selfish hope that anyone else can confirm my reality and prove that I haven’t lost the capacity for story comprehension.

All that being said, the 10-year-old seemed to like it. In that sense, one could argue that Candy Cane Lane did its job. …But at what cost?