Fatman (2020)
(In French, On TV, December 2022) You probably don’t know this because you probably don’t live in the Ottawa area, but much local press was written and said about Mel Gibson being in town to shoot Fatman. Taking advantage of a robust TV-movie filmmaking industry, the producers of the film ended up in (and around) Ottawa to portray the cold snowy landscapes required by the script, and many people went nuts over the possibility of seeing the once-disgraced veteran actor walking around. Breathless celebrity sightings clearly showed Ottawa’s lack of detachment when it comes to real celebrities—politicians barely count unless it’s an American president. All of this to say that Fatman’s production got a lot of local chatter. Few bothered to follow up on the finished film, and it’s just as well, because Fatman is an ill-conceived clunker that doesn’t exactly cover mercifully unidentified Ottawa in any glory. The premise feels like a rejected sketch idea: What if Santa was real and a dissatisfied boy hired a hitman to kill him? What maybe could have been spun into something entertaining is here executed with a lack of budget, grace, wit or tonal unity. Going for a gritty dark gory atmosphere feels like a juvenile re-thread of fairly common ground when it comes to Christmas horror, but brother-filmmakers Eshom and Ian Nelmsare are clearly hampered by a few things. Portraying Santa’s Alaskan workshop as an Eastern Ontario farm but trying to create a world in which elves toil on manufacturing lines to serve the US Army is irreconcilable, and that’s after the gory plot (featuring Walter Goggins as an ace assassin) gets going. A tremendously loathsome 12-year-old character drives much of the film, but the film itself often feels like a sociopathic fantasy badly executed. The suspension of disbelief never happens, and we’re left to gawk at the many ways the film fumbles. By the time Gibson and Goggins’ characters are blowing holes into each other with firearms in freezing temperatures, it’s not much of an action climax—it’s a relief that things are going to be over soon. It’s not a complete disaster: Goggins is up to his usual standards, while Marianne Jean-Baptiste is the most likable character here. (Gibson may have turned heads when he was in town, but I much would have rather run into Goggins or Jean-Baptiste.) Some of the action beats almost work when taken in isolation from their larger context. The rest, though? It’s a film that doesn’t have a consistent tone, relishes in pointless violence, doesn’t have the budget of its ambitions, and repeatedly mishandles its material. There’s very little satirical material here, for instance, and the film doesn’t put in the work required to make us believe in Santa Claus. Perhaps it’s for the best that the film’s Ottawan fame stayed limited to its production.
