It’s the Christmas season, so now we’re in the wave of holiday movies, especially on all the many streaming services and basic cable channels. Amazon MGM has one entry themselves, Candy Cane Lane partnering Eddie Murphy with Reginald Hudlin again, who hasn’t made a movie together since 1992’s Boomerang. Here, Eddie Murphy stars with Tracee Ellis Ross, Thaddeus J. Mixson, Genneya Walton, and Madison Thomas as the Carver family. Murphy plays the patriarch, Chris, who loves Christmas to a very obsessive level. The suburban cul-de-sac they live in has a very competitive holiday decorations culture, with Ken Marino’s Bruce as the top guy in the neighborhood. Chris wishes to beat him in the local competition but is thrown off when he’s let go at his job while his wife Carol (Ellis Ross) is about to be promoted. His frustration with his job loss and not wanting to tell his children leads him to become even more obsessed with having the best-decorated house. This leads him and his youngest daughter, Holly (Thomas), to find this amazing Christmas decorations store run by Pepper (Jillian Bell). Chris, so excited to get these amazing decorations (spoiler alert), signs away his life unintentionally to basically a Devil Elf. Chris quickly learns that after impressing the community, the 12 days of Christmas come alive, and he must gather gold rings to stop himself from becoming an ornament for eternity. He’s helped by a group of little ornament people who were all previously tricked by Pepper. These folks are voiced by Nick Offerman, Chris Redd, Robin Thede, and the singing group Pentatonix.
While I feel the film’s heart is in the right place, it is very much all over the place. It tries to navigate being a family-friendly winter holiday horror movie and a family comedy about families being in different places and needing to come together again as the older kids try to assert their identities to their parents. All this with CG characters and stuff for Eddie Murphy to have comedic interactions with all the time. The movie’s unfocused nature makes it feel a bit too long and a bit overstuffed. All that being said, I laughed, and I did so many times while watching this. I think that helps because it’s a TV movie. It comes across as an expensive Christmas holiday movie of the more recent past, like something you’d see on a broadcast network or the Disney channel in the late 90s or early 2000s. On those merits, the movie is fine. It’s not amazing, and it’s something you can have on and not wholly follow, and it’ll still make sense in the end. The CG is quite good, and the characters look like their actors and give funny performances. Candy Cane Lane wasn’t a waste of time, but there are better things you can watch for the holiday season.
Score: C
