Candy Cane Lane movie review: Eddie Murphy sleepwalks through excruciatingly shallow Christmas comedy

With a lot of time on his hands and a determination to not let setbacks dampen the Christmas spirit at home, he devotes himself to crafting — Chris fancies himself a ‘carver’ — the best front-yard decorations on his entire street. Out shopping with his younger daughter one day, he stumbles into a magical shop run by a young woman named Pepper, and literally signs his life away in a moment of weakness. Chris learns that Pepper is a disgruntled elf who used to work for Santa Claus, but was demoted for being too harsh on the ‘naughty kids’. And as an act of rebellion, she has decided to turn them all into porcelain dolls.

This is the fate that awaits Chris unless he is able to complete a generic mission, collect half-a-dozen generic artefacts, and bond with his generic family and children in the stipulated time. What unfolds is the sort of movie that ceases to exist even before it is over. The storytelling is so downright disrespectful to the viewer’s intelligence, that you actively forget what happened just two scenes ago. It’s almost as if Hudlin expects you to watch with one eye on your phone.

Certainly, Murphy doesn’t care. Once the biggest movie star in the world, an entertainer whose mere presence (or voice) could elevate the routinely shoddy scripts he’d often attach himself to, he delivers a performance so lifeless in Candy Cane Lane it’s like he’s being forced to watch a hostage video. This is the kind of movie where you actually wish for the occasional exposition dump, only to understand what the characters — especially Chris — are meant to be feeling.

In one scene, his son informs him that he has always looked down on losers, which is a critical piece of information that neither the movie nor Murphy’s performance had communicated. But these glaring gaps in logic don’t stop Hudlin and writer Kelly Younger from devoting entire arcs to Chris’ two older kids — a girl who’s on the verge of going to college, and a boy who’s really bad at math. Come to think of it, this is the upper-limit of what the movie is willing to do in the name of character-work, but because it’s so shoddy overall, the bare minimum effort that it puts into creating relatable conflicts feels like an affront. It’s like they’re deliberately cutting corners.

Forget Murphy, there’s laziness behind the camera as well. Imagine my shock and sorrow when I discovered in the (unnecessarily elaborate) end credits sequence Candy Cane Lane has been shot by none other than Newton Thomas Sigel, who has gone from working with the likes of Spike Jonze and Nicholas Winding Refn to becoming the guy studios go to when they need someone who knows their way around green screens. In Candy Cane Lane, even a simple shot of a young girl taking her position on a race track can feel as artificial as the smile plastered on Murphy’s face. In an obvious attempt to overcompensate for all this nonsense, Tracee Ellis Ross, who plays Chris’ wife, goes on maximum overdrive. Her efforts, needless to say, are wasted.

Candy Cane Lane
Director – Reginald Hudlin
Cast – Eddie Murphy, Tracee Ellis Ross
Rating – 1/5