"Dear Santa" is a waste of a cool premise.

Dear Santa is one of those movies that works miracles to destroy a concept that had the potential to be funny, giving us a boring product that only survives viewing because it is short and has a fast enough pace so that we don't abandon it after the first bad joke.

And the fact is that the film directed by Bobby Farrelli has a premise that would be brilliant in a 12-minute short film, forced to support a feature film with unexpected emotional overtones where a dyslexic child sends a letter to Satan by mistake, which will be starred by the (recently) infamous Jack Black.

Unfortunately, Dear Santa is far from being a contemporary Christmas classic, and becomes a generic work that looks like many others (Beetlejuice is a perfect example) but at the same time fails when it comes to capturing the magic of them.

Its biggest problem? Aside from having little personality in terms of direction, Dear Santa refuses to take advantage of the cynicism of its premise to provide us with quality humor, relegating it to a series of uncomfortable gags where Jack Black does nothing particularly interesting.

For many, this is a testament to the decline that Christmas movies have suffered in recent years, however, there are many brilliant examples such as Holdovers, Klaus or the irreverent The Night Before that know how to capture the spirit of the holidays much more effectively. And, although I appreciate the simplicity of films like Dear Santa (and I understand that they are still works where hundreds of people put their all their effort) I honestly think that leaving it buried in the Paramount+ catalog without any kind of promotion was the right decision, regardless of whether the presence of stars like Black, Keegan-Michael Key and even Post Malone can fool us about its level of quality.

This score was taken from my Letterboxd account.