The Christmas Chronicles

The Leather-Jacketed Saint of Christmas Streaming

I did not have “thinking about Elvis Presley” on my bingo card when I hit play on a Netflix holiday movie. I also didn’t expect much, period. The algorithmic Christmas movie is usually a polished, frictionless thing—meant to run while you fold laundry or tape up gifts. Then Kurt Russell strolls into *The Christmas Chronicles* and suddenly the movie has a pulse. No padding. No glued-on snowy beard. Just a blood-red leather coat, his own magnificent facial hair, and that same coiled, casual swagger he brought to Snake Plissken and Jack Burton. It breaks the film’s spell—in the best way. And thank god for that.



Director Clay Kaytis, coming out of animation (he co-directed *The Angry Birds Movie*), builds the whole thing out of extremely familiar parts. Two grieving siblings in Massachusetts: true-believer Kate (Darby Camp) and her cynical, car-stealing older brother Teddy (Judah Lewis). Their firefighter dad has recently died, and their exhausted mom is left to hold everything together. The kids try to catch Santa on Kate’s retro camcorder, accidentally stow away on the sleigh, and trigger a mid-air crash over Chicago that scatters reindeer and presents. It’s the standard holiday-emergency kit, right down to slightly wonky CGI elves that look like rejected Minions. You can practically see producer Chris Columbus’s fingerprints, given he helped write the modern rulebook for this kind of seasonal slapstick with *Home Alone*.

And then Russell takes the wheel, and the script’s predictability basically stops mattering. As *Empire*’s Dan Jolin put it, the film is "as predictable as an Advent calendar, but thanks to Kurt Russell's grizzly charms, The Christmas Chronicles at least gives us one of the movies' best Santas yet." Russell doesn’t play St. Nick as an untouchable mascot. He’s a frustrated, weary, hyper-competent working guy. He’s genuinely irritated by the Coca-Cola billboards that turned him into an obese man who says "ho, ho, ho." Even the way he moves sells it—shoulders dropped, chest leading, like someone who’s been pulling all-nighters for seventeen centuries and is exhausted by the bad PR.



One scene in particular gleefully hops the family-friendly guardrails, and it rules. Stranded in Chicago without his magic, Santa gets arrested for grand theft auto and tossed into a holding cell. In most movies, that’s a quick sad-sack joke and you move on. Here, Russell finds Little Steven Van Zandt and his bandmates in the cell and turns it into a full-on performance. He doesn’t just sing "Santa Claus is Back in Town"; he uses it like a battering ram. He owns the room—hips, winks through the bars, the mic stand handled like it’s straight out of his *Elvis* muscle memory. The camera even relaxes and lets him cook. It has no business being in a kids’ movie, which is exactly why it lands.

When Russell isn’t around, though, you can see the seams. The green-screen flying has that flat, weightless streaming look. Kate and Teddy are saddled with real emotional weight, but the dialogue keeps making them announce what they feel instead of letting it surface. Still, there’s a lovely physical truth in Darby Camp’s performance—how she holds her father’s old camcorder with two tight fists, pressed to her chest like a shield. It’s small, and it feels real, and it anchors the high-speed nonsense in actual grief.



Franchise plans or no (and yes, a sequel eventually followed), this first one is a weird, lumpy, wildly watchable thing. It’s happy to be silly, but it treats its central icon with real respect. Russell takes a figure flattened by centuries of commercialization and somehow puts blood back in the body. I still don’t fully understand how an Elvis-impersonating, muscle-car-stealing Santa ended up feeling like the most alive holiday performance of the streaming era. But I’m very glad it did. He doesn’t just deliver the presents. He steals the whole damn show.