A full-on Vince Vaughn charm offensive gives loose-limbed holiday
tale Fred Claus its own successful,
charismatic personality and appeal. Re-teaming Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin and Vaughn for the third
time, the movie wraps Vaughn’s trademark quasi-improvisational runs of
passive-aggressive patter around two wan storylines — of fraternal tension and
Christmas under siege — making for a pleasant, form-fitted vehicle of
engagingly manic buoyance, if also one that pays inconsistent attention to its
own through lines.

Though he’s had many hits, Vaughn has yet to prove himself
as a stand-alone box office draw, and Fred
Claus represents the biggest challenge in that regard to date. Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up all opened to the tune of $30 million-plus, but had the advantage
of high-profile costars. While staffed with capable, recognizable supporting
players, Fred Claus is being sold on Vaughn’s
name alone. Still, a big opening for the movie seems guaranteed. The question is whether Warner
Bros. can make inroads with the same audience that made Will Ferrell’s Elf a PG-rated smash four years ago in the same frame; this will
depend on whether fans of Vaughn’s edgier fare return for encore servings.

Fred became the polar opposite: a
fast-talking, rakishly self-centered repo man whose daydream schemes and serial
absentmindedness leave his girlfriend, traffic cop Wanda (Rachel Weisz),
perpetually exasperated.

Needing a sum of cash to close on an investment deal, Fred
turns to impersonating a Salvation Army Santa Claus, which lands him in jail.
He then calls his brother. Nicholas agrees to help Fred on one condition: that he come to the
North Pole for a long-delayed visit, and “earn” the money he needs by helping
out in Santa’s workshop. Old fraternal tensions, mostly of the one-sided
variety, come bubbling to the surface, and matters are further put at risk when
stern “efficiency expert” Clyde Northcut (Kevin Spacey) arrives to audit
Nicholas’ enterprise, putting the future of the jolliest holiday of the
year in jeopardy.

Fred Claus works
first and foremost as a vehicle for Vaughn’s goosed-up, chatterbox patter; key
to the entire enterprise is an appreciation of the actor as verbose, besieged
and aggrieved. This means there’s little for Mama and in particular Papa Claus (Kathy
Bates and Trevor Peacock, respectively) to do, and there are a few laid-track
story strands that don’t bring much to the movie. The movie’s mandate is clearly broad appeal, which also
leads to the somewhat sigh-inducing inclusion of goosed-up, slide-scale sound
effects during a chase sequence involving multiple Santas. A couple of these impromptu
slapstick bits, like a snowball fight between Fred and Nick, don’t rise above the
level of distractible interjections, but others (a finger-snapping dance
montage set to “Rubberneckin’”) get one’s blood pumping even though their
narrative inessentiality is completely transparent.

Instead of answering genuine questions born of the narrative
(Are the Claus family immortal, and if so how would that affect Fred’s
relationship with Wanda? Exactly who has discretionary approval over Christmas?),
Dan Fogelman’s script wastes an awful lot of time dawdling on petty, and less
interesting, matters. Still, there are also some genuine and pleasant surprises
in the narrative, including a “Siblings Anonymous” meeting with cameos from the
brothers of Sylvester Stallone, Alec Baldwin and former President Bill Clinton. In case there were still doubts, meanwhile, Dobkin proves himself a
gifted, intuitive comedic director. Even if one has qualms with the story
choices, it’s easy to recognize the effective manner in which he stages a scene
and draws out naturalistic performances and reactions.

Vaughn, as previously mentioned, is innately charming, a
fact of which Fred Claus serves as
the umpteenth example. Always a savvy professional, Giamatti injects a few
small, smart notes of stress and vexation into his performance as the
beleaguered Nicholas. Other actors aren’t given as much to do, though Spacey
does subtly channel some Lex Luthor villainy, all of which pays off in a scene
that amusingly touches on Superman. The film also makes hearty use of motion capture digital head
replacement, in similar fashion to the Wayans brothers’ movie Little Man. While not without its
occasional seams, visual effects supervisor Alex Bicknell’s work with John
Michael Higgins and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges — the former as Santa’s
second-in-command, the latter as an elf workshop deejay — will surely delight
younger viewers. For the complete original review, from Screen International, click here.

Femme-centric Korean thriller 7 Days, not to be confused with the recent Mexican film of the same translation, presents an intriguing if slightly overlong mixture of the crime
and procedural genres, with a very personally motivated ticking-clock element
thrown in for good measure. While trading in a bit of grisly imagery, the film
for the most part eschews the gore of recent like-minded films about a killer’s
manipulations, and doesn’t embrace the supernatural elements of contemporary
Korean thrillers like Arang, Silk and Apartment 1303 either. Instead, 7 Days sticks to grim, human-fueled
mayhem and panicked investigative maneuverings, bogging down a bit in the
second act before saving itself with a big, enormously satisfying hook in its
final reel.

hyper-charged design, slick commercial moves and end twist. Key to the
film’s much more modest chances overseas — either theatrically, with urban crime
pic fans who picked up on OldBoy’s
scent, or more likely on DVD, where Asian imports have carved out a nice niche
— will be its efforts to try to capitalize on the burgeoning recognizability of
front-and-center star Yunjin Kim (above), an integral cast member on ABC’s hit show Lost.

Single mother Jiyeon Lee (Kim) is a brilliant and successful
attorney who’s never lost a case. After her latest victory, her 8-year-old daughter
Eunyoung is kidnapped from a mother-child relay race at school. In lieu of
ransom, the kidnapper phones Jiyeon and instructs her that he wants her to legally
represent, and free from prison a drug peddler and habitual sexual offender, the accused in a heinous rape and murder case — a
trial coming up for capital punishment in less than a week. With her daughter convincingly threatened harm if she goes
to the police, Jiyeon throws herself into the case. For assistance she relies only
on old friend Sung-yeol Kim (Hee-soon Park), an independent-minded cop under internal
investigation for his own appetite for excesses, and even then doesn’t tell him
the entire truth. Jiyeon at first suspects a willfully botched
investigation or police cover-up, but then focuses in on a club-scene drug addict who seems to have suffered a psychotic split,
but nonetheless may have an important connection to the deceased. Meanwhile, Jiyeon sees her own despondency
paralleled by Sooki Han (Misook Kim), the mother of the victim, and works desperately
to please her daughter’s kidnapper and thus keep alive hope for her safe
return.

Ignoring the somewhat necessary absurdity of its
halfheartedly explained accelerated legal timeline — something the thriller Fracture, starring Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins, also recently deployed — 7 Days packs a breathless amount of investigative findings and head
feints into its two-hour running time. There at first glance seem a few too
many red herrings and/or loose, extraneous threads — including a bitter
prosecutor aiming for professional payback against Jiyeon, a party promoter
involved in a car accident on the night of the murder, and the reemergence of a
gangster acquitted by Jiyeon — but 7 Days
eventually winds its way to a conclusion of some shared complicity, so the vast
sprawl of its story is somewhat mitigated.

The chief problem is that the movie’s meticulously chaotic shooting
and editing style works against this expansive tapestry for a decent portion of
its middle, with willful freneticism obscuring key narrative details. Director Won Shin-Yeon and cinematographer Young-Hwan Choi give 7 Days a very modern, shimmering,
kinetic feeling — albeit too frequently also a somewhat juvenile restless one. They
seemingly draw inspiration from both small screen American serials like CSI and Cold Case and the quick-cut, quasi-impressionistic style of director
Michael Bay,
using crime scenes and car chases alike as an excuse to showcase flashes of the
same setting from all sorts of angles. These
modes of storytelling have the damning paradoxical effect of making 7 Days drag and seem longer, especially
in sequences with long dialogue exchanges. A more restrained focus on the
characters themselves would have increased the movie’s tension and intrigue.
For the slightly longer, original full review, from Screen International, click here.