The Christmas Chronicles review: Kurt Russell is in the pantheon of great movie Santas, but the movie is no festive classic

Russell was a coup for Netflix, but he's let down by an unbelievably stock 'race against time to save Christmas' script

You have to go back over a decade to find the last vintage year for Christmas movies. It was 2003 that saw the double whammy of Elf and Love Actually, and there hasn't really been a Christmas film since that's truly cemented itself as essential festive viewing. Only being of interest to audiences for approximately three weeks of the year, they're not always a wise investment for studios, and who really wants to trudge to the cinema when it's so cold out?

This is where Netflix comes in, the home streaming service and logical saviour of the Yuletide movie. It has a veritable Christmas cavalcade marching out this year: A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding, Angela's Christmas, The Holiday Calendar and The Princess Switch.

The Christmas Chronicles is its main bet for Xmas morning gift opening background TV, however, with none other than Kurt Russell playing the main man.

Santa Claus has never looked so cool. Eschewing his usual woollen outfit, this Santa wears a red leather coat, long riding gloves and coiffured beard. Gone are the bright white linings, his coat instead being embellished with brown fur that disturbingly looks like it could have been stripped from a reindeer. Santa looks semi-cowboy, as though Russell's Hateful Eight character has fallen into a vat of candy-red paint and wandered onto a different film set.

The departures from tradition stop there, because The Christmas Chronicles's plot is about as stock as it gets. Like a million festive movies before it, we find Santa having an absolute shocker on Christmas Eve and frantically trying to complete his annual lightning tour of home invasions before the sun comes up.

Kate (Darby Camp) and her older brother Teddy (Judah Lewis) are the kids who put a spanner in the works on this occasion – warring siblings who accidentally cause Santa to crash his sleigh in the middle of Chicago and must help him get back on the chimney circuit.

Santa's hampered by police, who you think would have enough on their plate in America's so-called murder capital, but seem to be concerned by his reckless driving and ravings about elves nonetheless.

(Netflix (Netflix)

Officers Povenda (Martin Roach) and Jameson (New Girl's Larmorne Morris) manage to bring humour to the movie, but are underused. Instead, Mr Claus's brief time in the slammer is taken up by an unexpected and slightly delirious musical number, Russell singing the blues with a little help from a cellmate who is played by none other than Steve Van Zandt (Bruce Springsteen's guitarist and Sil from The Sopranos). Goldie Hawn (Russell's wife) also pops up as Mrs Claus, and with these celebrity cameos we're reminded of what is still Netflix's best festive effort to date, Sofia Coppola's A Very Murray Christmas.

The Christmas Chronicles's hackneyed story does at least feel rooted in 2018, the millennial kids compulsively filming their adventure with Santa rather than just living in the moment. This irks Santa, a traditionalist who is quick to shoot down the idea of getting an Uber when his sleigh crashes.

Santa also refuses to say "ho ho ho" and rejects depictions of him as fat. He even labels this "fake news" at one point, suggesting that he's not in fact a complete luddite after all, though this moment pulls you out the narrative a little as you imagine Santa following the ins and outs of the war between Trump and CNN.

Russell makes for a very fine Santa Claus, but he can't elevate a fairly dull script and a plot so familiar that even the youngest viewers will see all the twists coming. The Home Alones and Die Hards of this world manage to not be "just for Christmas", but it's hard to see this one making it past New Year's Day.