Candy Cane Lane

The Christmas subgenre feels somewhat starved for content. Generally, most Christmas films are straight-to-video or straight-to-streaming and have fairly generic rom-com plots. This film is more of a family comedy and has a decent enough premise, but the film unfortunately fails to be anything above average. 

I have enjoyed several Christmas family comedies before, like Home Alone and Elf. However, Candy Cane Lane lacks the solid comedy the former two films had. The film does have a handful of mildly amusing moments and decent joke ideas, but the way the film is written and directed leads to these jokes not landing all that well. It’s perhaps the film’s biggest shortcoming, as it’s a family comedy that comes so close to being funny several times but never actually evokes any laughter from me. 

Eddie Murphy is a great comedic actor and a good comedian in his own right, but this film is really not playing into his strength. He comes across as an actor that you let riff on set for hours and then whittle his parts down to the funniest minutes, but this film just felt like he was going through the motions and throwing out the occasional weak comedy line the entire runtime. Usually great comedic actors like Nick Offerman and Riki Lindhome are unable to bring anything to their roles, which is a massive shame. Offerman is even doing an hilarious accent! How was the film unable to mine that for any great comedic bits? 

As mentioned previously, the film is fairly run-of-the-mill. This doesn’t inherently have to be a problem for me if the movie is well-constructed, but it is sadly is filled with clichés and obvious moments that are conducted in a disappointingly unengaging manner. The film is also nearly 2 hours in length and does not justify this length in any way. It reaches a natural conclusion 90 minutes in but decides to extend the runtime by nearly 30 minutes to create some extra conflict that feels obscenely unnecessary by the end.

Beyond the comedic elements, the film features the occasional action elements, primarily during the third act. Alas, it similarly is unable to conduct these sequences well. There are some creative concepts here and there, but in execution, each one falls completely flat. This is exacerbated by uninteresting cinematography and dull editing. The film construction is fairly lifeless, and there is nothing major of substance beyond a few decent moments sprinkled sparingly throughout.

This is far from a terrible film but considering what it could’ve been, Candy Cane Lane left me feeling absolutely nothing but disappointment by the end.

5/10