REVIEW:
Noelle is a fine Christmas movie. It’s cute and charming and all of those things, but it’s also not the greatest. You see, most Christmas movies these days are about Santa and the North Pole. So each movie about that needs a new angle. This movie’s angle is “what if the wrong person was chosen to be Santa Claus?” But even that isn’t incredibly original (it’s in many ways the same premise as Arthur Christmas, for example.)
In this movie Anna Kendrick plays Noelle, the sister of the guy chosen to be the new Santa, played by Bill Hader. Only Noelle is better suited for the job. She can tell that her brother is having a hard time with it, so she advises him to go away for a weekend. He does. Only he never comes back.
Noelle’s mission or quest in the movie is to go find her brother and bring him home. And of course, in doing so, the message of who the real Santa should be comes out. There are some clever ideas here, like Hager’s training to become Santa, and the way a cousin (played by Billy Eichner,) takes over as Santa and uses an algorithm to figure out that most kids are naughty and don’t deserve any presents at all.
But at the same time, there’s a little too much that’s too familiar. Noelle, in a regular small town is your usual fish out of water story, including her developing feelings for a young private detective she meets and hires to help find her brother. The story about how anyone can be Santa is nice for girl power… women can do anything sentiment, but it also feels a little off. Still, it’s cute snd fun and a very light-hearted Christmas movie.