By Geno McGahee
Eddie Murphy can be really great and has proven himself time and time again with movies like BEVERLY HILLS COP, LIFE, THE NUTTY PROFESSOR and COMING TO AMERICA, but then he makes really shitty movies too like COMING 2 AMERICA (especially) and NORBIT. I didn’t know what to expect, but considering that the last direct to streaming film I saw was COMING 2 AMERICA, I wasn’t overly optimistic about CANDY CANE LANE. When the trailer was launched, my optimism did not grow.
Chris (Murphy) is a Christmas enthusiast that is involved in a yearly competition with the neighborhood for who has the best decorated house. Everything that Chris makes is handmade and wooden and he’s taking on his neighbors but he doesn’t like his chances to win when he sees all of the décor that the neighbors have purchased.
After getting fired from his job, Chris focuses solely on the Candy Cane Lane contest and with 100K hanging in the balance, he needs to win. He goes to a shop and meets Pepper (Jillian Bell), the shop owner, and purchases a ton of impressive decorations, but they come with a price. Pepper is an elf that has been misbehaving and anyone that makes a deal with her will eventually become a decoration themselves.
The first 30 minutes of this film was pretty good. The relationship between Chris and his neighbors was funny at times and I began to have some hope for this one, but it died shortly after and this film began to feel less and less like a Christmas movie. It became a bad GOOSEBUMPS knockoff.
To avoid becoming a decoration, Chris teams up with his family to get 12 rings from various characters in the 12 Days of Christmas song. The family goes around chasing around geese, drummers and more but the film was really dragging at this point. The emphasis seemed to be on CGI more than anything else at this point despite it trying to put forth the message the best part of the holiday is family. I appreciate that, but there is a lot of wasted talent here in this one.
I am happy that I’m not stuck with just Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies this year to review, but the two Amazon Prime entries are far from impressive despite the amount of talent that they had to work with CANDY CANE LANE and GENIE are both very forgettable and neither really captures the Christmas feel.
Santa (David Alan Grier) shows up and basically fixes everything, but I had lost interest at this point. The inclusion of Grier backs up my point. They had so much talent here and it just died after 30 minutes. I have to say that it was good to see Grier again, but I’m sure most of the audience shut off the movie before they got to see him.
CANDY CANE LANE is a major disappointment. It’s not as bad as COMING 2 AMERICA. I don’t think a movie exists that can say that, but this film had all the elements needed to be a good holiday film. It just misses the mark, runs too long and does not feel like a Christmas movie despite all the lights and bulbs. I don’t recommend it.
