A typo makes its way to Jack Black's Satan in the dreadful Dear Santa
A bad Christmas movie, built from old wordplay, that has no idea what to do with its Satanic silliness.
Photo: Paramount+
If you live in a country where Christmas is widely celebrated, and you’re drawing oxygen, you’ve probably heard at least one person point out that “Santa” and “Satan” are made up of the same letters. Maybe it was your nosy evangelical neighbor. Maybe it was a kid at school. Maybe you saw something like the 2020 TV movie Letters To Satan Claus and went “Oh, I get it.” It’s an old bit. But if anyone is able to spruce the gag up, it’s Peter and Bobby Farrelly, right? The team behind There’s Something About Mary and Dumb And Dumber, the guys who built careers out of stretching silly jokes and sillier behavior into movie-length amusements. Surely they can take this simple bit, a piece of wordplay so simple that seven-year-olds have it figured out, and make something amusing out of it. In Dear Santa, the Farrelly brothers (Bobby directs, while Peter co-wrote the script with Ricky Blitt) use that wordplay as the hook of a simple question: What if a kid with dyslexia accidentally sent a letter to Satan instead of Santa?
In Dear Santa, the kid is Liam (Robert Timothy Smith), a sweet 11-year-old who’s tired of his parents (Brianne Howey and Hayes MacArthur) fighting, and just wants to have a nice Christmas. So, despite his parents’ concerns that he might be getting too old for the Santa thing, Liam writes a letter to the man up North, but accidentally addresses the envelope to “Satan.” Why does he just write “Santa” instead of “Santa Claus”? Why doesn’t his mother, who’s there when he fills out the envelope, check the spelling of the child she knows has a learning disability? These are questions soon forgotten as the film presents a bevy of head-scratchers.
Mere hours after the letter hits the mailbox, Satan (Jack Black, channeling Wilford Brimley) arrives in Liam’s bedroom, pretending to be Santa and explaining that, actually, all the things Liam’s been taught about Christmas are nonsense. Santa doesn’t bring gifts on Christmas morning, the fake Claus says. Instead, he’ll grant Liam three wishes, anything he wants as long as it doesn’t change history. The catch? If Liam actually goes through with all three wishes, the Devil will take his soul.
It’s a genuinely interesting setup for the kind of stock holiday morality play so often trotted out this time of year. Dear Santa gets more interesting when Liam’s best friend Gibby (Jaden Carson Baker) points out that something weird is going on, and Satan is forced to admit his charade. How would an 11-year-old boy, faced with such a dark bargain, contend with the idea of wishes that will make his mortal life better if it means his immortal soul is in danger? How does that translate to the rough world of middle school, where Liam is busy dealing with crushes, bullies, and the meanest English teacher the world has ever known? What’s more, how does Satan navigate the bargain, knowing that he’s taking such an innocent soul, rather than a more easily corruptible, malleable one?