Fatman

Year 16, Day 349 - 12/14/24 - Movie #4,895

BEFORE: Well, it's been quite a week, but then again, I was sort of expecting that. I was scheduled for more hours than usual, from a Saturday night screening of a film I worked on that was screening at the theater where I ALSO work, through 14-hour work days on Tuesday, Wednesday AND Friday.  I must be some kind of glutton for punishment. Yesterday was Friday the 13th and I was working the premiere of a VERY big film (hint: Zimmerman) and I was on outdoor duty most of the night, and it was freakin' cold.  One woman passed out as she was crossing through the barricades, and even though there were security guards all around I still had to make sure she was attended to, and that the police officer next to me called an ambulance, and then I had to check with the EMTs to make sure she was OK.  Then, after midnight when I was trying to get the theater back in order and go home, I slipped and fell outside and got a cut on my head.  Not a bad one, I'm just lucky I didn't do any more damage to myself, I landed on my shoulder so that's going to hurt for a while - thankfully the job's winding down for the school's winter break, so I'll have a lot of time at home to recover coming up very soon. 

Mel Gibson carries over again from "Bandit". You probably figured out this was coming, this is a Christmas movie coming in a bit early, but the schedule dictated this going here so I could get to two more Christmas movies in the week after next.  

THE PLOT: A rowdy, unorthodox Santa Claus is fighting to save his declining business. Meanwhile, Billy, a neglected and precocious 12 year old, hires a hit man to kill Santa after receiving a lump of coal in his stocking.  

AFTER: This is part of a trend in Christmas movies to "modernize" the Santa Claus story, I think between the Tim Allen "Santa Clause" films (never seen them) and others like "Santa Claus: The Movie" this has been going on for some time now.  So Mel Gibson is the latest to take on a Santa with a more contemporary feel - last year it was Kurt Russell in "The Christmas Chronicles" and the voice of J.K. Simmons in "Klaus" before that.  If I'm being honest I was kind of hoping I could link to "Violent Night" with David Harbour, but it just wasn't in the cards based on what I watched in November.  Maybe next year - also that movie "Red One" is in theaters now, with J.K. Simmons (again?) playing a modern, very fit and muscular Santa. Not sure how I feel about that, but like I always say, put it on the list, maybe I can get to it some time in the future. 

I had a couple beers tonight, a little holiday cheer, one was a Deep River "Ginger Snapped" oatmeal stout, with hints of molasses, ginger and other spices. As soon as I saw Mel Gibson as Santa shooting up some beer cans, I figured I made the right choice to pair the beer with the film.  I could probably do a whole different blog about what beer or cocktail to pair with each movie, but you know, there's a reason why I don't usually do this, because I get sleepy enough watching movies as it is.  But tonight I could use a little "muscle relaxant" because of the shoulder pain.  Earlier today we also drove out to Long Island so my wife could get smokes, and after we had lunch at a place called Shennanigan's (really) we hit up a holiday market, and there was a brewery there, Great South Bay, and I picked up another six of their Roasty Toasty stout. Dark beers for winter, that's my jam. 

Anyway, Gibson puts a new spin on Santa Claus here, or Chris Cringle, really.  It's weird that they play this one so straight, like it's a comedy but one that takes itself way too serious or something.  How do you balance the typical nonsense and frivolity of the usual Santa story?  Well, I guess by depicting the workshop as a failing business, even with the U.S. government subsidizing it and giving Santa a big check every month.  By delivering Christmas presents to all the good children, he's helping the U.S. economy, err, somehow, I guess in a roundabout way if he delivers presents then Christmas is a big deal, and then people go out and buy food for Christmas dinner and presents for each other and all of that boosts the U.S. GDP.  Right?  It's trickle-up economics, or something.  Santa's actions help the Dow Jones index?  

Oh, and Santa's not just an action hero here, he's got some kind of super-powers, like he's super-strong (has to be, to lift all those toys) and he's got a super memory (again, he has to, to maintain such a long gift list every year) and by extension super-speed if he can deliver to millions of houses in one night.  Very conveniently, we don't actually see him delivering on Christmas Eve, because really, he's so fast you can't catch him on camera, so don't even try - but we do see him coming back to the workshop on Christmas morning, after being shot and getting ready to heal with his super-healing power.  Come on, who shot Santa? It's not like his sleigh looks anything like a drone or a foreign military plane!

But again, things are not all fine at the workshop, because Santa's been giving out more and more coal every year to the bad kids (this tracks too, kids have been getting worse, thanks to social media bullying and also regular bullying, not to mention ADHD and being over-sugared and over-caffeinated and over-weight, this new generation of kids is probably the naughtiest ever.). So the government's cut Santa's check in half, since he only delivered gifts to about half of the kids.  But the flipside of this is that Santa himself has been keeping America's coal producers in business, despite the push to switch to cleaner energy sources.  Windmills are bad for the coal industry, but naughty kids are GREAT for it.  

One kid in particular has spent too much time alone, his rich father is off on business trips to the Caribbean again and again, so he's raised by his grandmother and the house staff, so he pretty much gets whatever he wants, or he figures out a way to get it.  He even hires a hit-man to kidnap the little girl who won the science fair so he could threaten her into giving up her first-place ribbon so he could win instead of being first runner-up.  Parents, do you SEE what happens to your kids when you never say "NO" to them?  They just turn into entitled brats, and your actions (or inactions) allow this to happen.  

Santa, the voice of reason here, and also a couple centuries of arcane knowledge and elf management, gives this rich kid the lump of coal he deserves - but little Billy decides to dip into grandma's checking account again and hire the hit-man to take Santa Claus out.  The hit-man, who's listed in the credits only as "Skinny Man" is willing to take the job because he's got his own agenda against the Fatman, at some point Santa stopped fulfilling his Christmas wish list.  (Well, we find out near the end of the film that the child who later became Skinny Man had very unreasonbale requests, but I guess that's neither here nor there, because he still holds that grudge.)

So while Chris Cringle is forced to re-tool his workshop to produce jet fighter control panels for the U.S. Dept. of Defense - and after telling his elves this will only be for two months, anyway it's the slow season because no kids have Christmas requests in January or February, and they can go back to making toys in March - there's a killer driving up through Canada in the days after Christmas to reach Santa's workshop, which is somewhere in Alaska, it turns out.  This hit-man is slick, he couldn't find any record online about where that workshop is, so he tracked him through the mail - those letters that kids write to Santa have to go somewhere, don't they?  

Once he's found the right town, it only takes a little bit of asking around to find out that Cringle comes by every few days to check his P.O. box, and that he drives a red Ford pick-up (again, makes sense) and then he follows him back to the workshop and reindeer farm.  Though perhaps he wasn't expecting to encounter the U.S. military there, overseeing the new assembly line.  Again, all of this is played STRAIGHT, like we're supposed to take this all very very seriously, which, in itself, is quite hilarious.  So it's funny how non-funny this film is, if that makes sense. 

Oh, you can TRY to kill Santa, but again, he's got Wolverine-like healing, and also he's super-strong and super durable and also he's not bad with weapons either.  Yeah, if you come for the Fatman you'd better bring an army.  One hit-man with a sniper rifle just isn't going to cut it.  I suppose that's not as comforting as it sounds, but it's what we're asked to play along with here.  Santa may be a couple hundred years old and also may have fallen on some hard times, but the jolly old elf still has some tricks up his sleeve.  

Santa learns the hard way, though, what this new Generation Alpha is capable of - like hiring a hit-man to take him out and not even feeling bad about it.  Oh, well, yeah, that's going to change now that Santa knows the score, he's got to change with the times and it's time to send out a new message to the entitled pre-teens: straighten up and fly right, because the big fluffy gloves are OFF.  So, umm, you better watch out.  That's it, cry or don't cry, but you better watch out because he's coming to town. And he's pissed off. Hey, maybe this IS the Santa Claus that the next generation needs, after all. 

Also starring Walton Goggins (last seen in "Three Christs"), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (last heard in "The Sea Beast"), Chance Hurstfield (last seen in "Coffee & Kareem"), Susanne Sutchy, Robert Bockstael, Michael Dyson (last seen in "Murder at 1600"), Deborah Grover (last seen in "Alice, Darling"), Ellison Grier Butler, Eric Woolfe (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Lynne Adams (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Ekaterina Baker (last seen in "The Protégé"), Natale Darbyson (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Robert Reynolds (ditto), Corbin Smyth Currie, Paul Whitney, Paulino Nunes (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Kate Hurman, John Tokatlidis, Sean Devine (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Sean Tucker (last seen in "Pieces of a Woman"), Shaun Benson (last seen in "K-19: The Widowmaker"), Mikael Conde (last seen in "Midway"), Ronald Tang, Peter Chow, Jack Sivyer, Xavier X. Sotelo, Alexa Devine, Ellen Manchee, Bill Turnbull (last seen in "Little Italy"), Daniel Garcia, Dylan Roberts (last seen in "Amelia"), Jason Gosbee (last seen in "White House Down"), Stefan Keyes, Bill Lake (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Michelle Lang, Michael Dickson, Gordon Finley, Mireille Gagne, Claude Guertin, Claude Huard, Caren MacNevin, Kevin Barry McIntyre, Joyce Rivera and the voice of Tom Fugedi.   

RATING: 6 out of 10 glasses of milk

Bandit

Year 16, Day 344 - 12/9/24 - Movie #4,894

BEFORE: Just two movies this week, and I want to get just a LITTLE closer to Christmas before I watch the next movie after this.  You get it, right?  But it works out great because I'm going to have three very long shifts over the next 4 days, I don't know when or how I'm going to sleep, but I suppose I'll figure that out.  And sleeping is actually more important than watching movies, it turns out.  There's a lot of coffee needed to make this week possible, but then when it wears off I'm probably going to crash real hard.  See you on the other side. 

Mel Gibson carries over from "On the Line". 

THE PLOT: After escaping from a Michigan prison, a career criminal assumes a new identity in Canada and goes on to rob a record 59 banks and jewelry stores while being hunted by a police task force. Based on the story of the Flying Bandit.  

AFTER: This film is based on the true story of an American who moved to Canada and robbed almost 60 banks over a few years, due to the fact that nobody in Canada ever saw the need to have armed guards in every bank.  Even after this man, who went by the name of Robert Whiteman for many years, robbed many banks successfully, this was NOT enough motivation to hire proper security for every bank in Canada, that just wasn't seen as a proper use of bank resources, hiring thousands of security guards across the country.  Who knows, maybe when you factor in the guards' salaries, plus health care, pension, disability pay, sick leave, workers compensation, and paid leave, perhaps it was cheaper to just let this guy rob a bank or two a month. Who's to say?  

His real name wasn't Robert Whiteman at all, it was Gilbert Galvan Jr. when he lived in America, but then when he broke out of prison and headed up to Canada, he couldn't get a job selling ice cream unless he had a Canadian I.D., so he paid a homeless guy $22 (Canadian) for his I.D.  The movie at this point tells us, "This really happened." but I'm not so sure about this part of the story.  For one thing, isn't it much too cold up in Canada to eat ice cream, and also, that's a thing that happy people do, and I'm not sure Canadians are capable of feeling things like joy and happiness.  I could be wrong, though.

Whiteman's small business dreams are crushed, however, when the ice cream business decides to focus on sales made by truck, rather than those little bicycle carts. So Whiteman has to teach himself to rob banks, because it's not like he can get a driver's license for an ice cream truck, that would be ridiculous.  Also he can't possibly become a carpenter, electrician, painter, postal worker, car salesman, office worker, grocery store worker, pizza delivery guy, bank teller, news reporter, movie theater usher, librarian, bartender, waiter, limo driver, radio DJ, furniture salesman, insurance broker, shoe salesman, baker, barista, hospital orderly, bricklayer, furniture mover, baggage handler, barber, cashier, florist, gardener, plumber, grave-digger, mechanic, photographer, farmer, doorman, lifeguard, fisherman or tour guide, now could he?  Nope, it's either selling ice cream by bicycle or robbing banks, those would appear to be his only two options, because it's the 1980's and Reaganomics are in play and all that. 

Maybe he should have just gone to work for a different ice cream bicycle cart company, or maybe he could have opened his own ice cream business, oh, but to do that he'd have to have money, and we're back at the same problem.  OK, robbing banks is it, I guess.  He does one robbery and gets a feel for it, he likes it AND he's kind of good at it, except he forgets to bring a bag to put the money in.  No worries, this is Canada so they just give you the money bag they have lying around and then they help you stuff the money in AND zip it up for you.  They're very nice people, these Canadians, maybe a bit simple, and they can't feel happiness, but otherwise they seem OK.  

The last time I was in Canada, my wife and I went to Niagara Falls and then drove through Ontario for a bit, I went to a beer festival in Hamilton that for some reason had a rock-climbing wall, probably a bad thing to have at a beer festival in retrospect.  I remember also getting ripped off for orange juice in a Denny's, they asked us if we wanted juice when we sat down, then brought us a whole pitcher, and honestly I was thinking about a glass, I don't love OJ enough to want a whole pitcher.  Then we saw that glasses of juice were FREE with every breakfast combo, so we could have just waited and had that, but instead we were charged about $18 for the pitcher we didn't really want.  I was mad until I remembered that was 18 Canadian dollars, and that's not even real money, so who cares? 

Anyway, Whiteman starts doing really well for himself, and decides to visit other Canadian provinces and pull his little bank robber act, then fly back to Ontario because nobody in Canada before him had ever considered leaving a city right after committing a crime, I guess most Canadian criminals wouldn't dream of doing that, instead they just stand outside the crime scene and wait for the RCMP to arrest them - well that would be the decent thing to do, I suppose.  Flying out of town to escape the law probably feels like cheating to them, like it just wouldn't be sporting.  But as an American he probably knew that after a bank robbery the best thing to do is get out of town, fast.  

It's strange that there are two schools of thought about this - the natural human instinct is to choose flight over fight, run away as soon as you've done something wrong, it just makes sense to the lizard brain.  Ah, but only guilty people run away, and if police see you running they could immediately know the score.  It takes a smart man to WALK away from the crime, because then you just look like a guy walking down the street. I remember a lot of kids in high school getting in trouble for leaving school early by trying to sneak out by the gym, which was close to the parking lot.  Well, forget it because the gym teacher will catch you, and now you've got detention.  If I had a study hall for last period, I used to walk out right by the office and wave to the secretaries as I left.  Now, I had a reputation as a straight-A student, so they never stopped me, not once, because I walked out and didn't try to run or sneak out, plus they figured if I was leaving early I probably had a darn good reason.  

That's the whole theory here in the depiction of Whiteman's robberies - he'd put on a fake nose or a weird wig or wear something notable like a construction worker's vest, and then ditch that right after the crime, change into a business suit, and WALK away from the bank, because he wanted to look like he had nothing to hide, and a guilty person wouldn't walk, they'd run.  Plus, the cops were looking for that construction worker with the big nose and the long hair, and well, that wasn't him, not any more. 

Right now law enforcement has been looking for the person who killed a health insurance CEO in New York, and it seems that he was able to get away from the scene by taking a bicycle through Central Park, where he ditched his backpack, then took a taxi from the Upper West Side to a bus terminal in the Bronx, and from there he got on a bus and headed out to Pennsylvania, and I'm guessing it was all done at normal human "nothing to see here" speed.  That's how you do it, really.  I also recall those prison inmates who busted out in upstate New York a few years back and most people figured they would head for Canada, which was RIGHT there, only that was just a little too obvious.  Nobody was, for example, expecting them to head south and try to make it to Mexico, but if they had, they might have been more successful. Just saying. 

In the meantime, since it was the 1980's, the airlines had just come up with this thing called frequent flyer miles, or maybe they were called "loyalty programs" back then, before SkyMiles or AdvantageMiles or whatever.  They knew you had a choice of airlines, and they wanted to thank you for your loyalty, so if you made enough trips on one airline, they tracked that and then they gave you gold or diamond or platinum medallion status.  If you reached 100,000 miles then I think you got to bang a stewardess, remember that it was a different time.  

Whiteman had been in a relationship, however, with a woman who ran the hostel or shelter or whatever he first stayed when he reached Ottawa.  He left her for a while back when he couldn't figure out if he really wanted to rob banks or sell ice cream for the rest of his life, and remember those were the ONLY two choices available to him, so he was relieved when he learned that he COULD rob banks and therefore he could support this beautiful woman that was way out of his league and he didn't deserve at all.  Whew, what a relief, and it's not like it's going to be really awkward when she finds out about the bank robberies, he just told her his father got him a job in Vancouver and he's got to fly there every couple of weeks to help analyze business security systems, which is kind of true, if you think of that as a euphemism for "casing a bank".  And he's got to fly back and forth because they haven't invented camera phones yet - yep, this alibi is totally believable, it's just not very true. 

Not-Whiteman gets financed by a gangster named Tommy Kay in exchange for a cut of the haul from each bank robbery, and the average heist nets him about $20,000 - but again, remember that's Canadian dollars, so it doesn't really go as far as you might think, since their money's not even real.  But the bad news is that there's a law enforcement task force trying to take Tommy Kay down, and they track everyone who comes and goes in and out of Tommy's club, so eventually the task force sets their eyes on Galvin/Whiteman, because they've got a feeling that he's up to something more than collecting a lot of air miles.  

Kay convinces Whiteman to stop robbing small banks with small payouts, and go for a bigger heist, something called "The Big Vancouver", which involves robbing a jewelry store.  It's an elaborate scheme, and though Robby is used to working alone, he teams up with one of Tommy's guys for the jewelery theft, and they almost get caught by the task force.  They only escape because Whiteman had the brilliant idea to hire a bunch of out-of-work actors to dress identically to the robbers and walk around the mail in pairs, so that the Task Force won't know which pair to track.  And Robby trained them all to walk away, not run.  

It was a great idea to cast Josh Duhamel, because he's a charming, attractive guy (jeez, I'm straight and I'd switch...) and so we like Robby and we want him to succeed.  We see a glimpse of the real Gilbert Galvan at the end of the movie, and he's nowhere near as attractive as Duhamel.  Maybe Galvan was 1980's attractive, but damn, Josh Duhamel looks like he was synthetically grown in a handsome lab or something.

Eventually, the money from Galvan's robberies is all gone, because he made the mistake of buying bigger and bigger houses with it, to keep impressing his wife.  Did he not sell the smaller houses when he bought the bigger ones?  I guess even in the 1980's, with a booming economy and Reaganomics working/not working, even a bank robber couldn't get ahead - eventually after a few years of paying that mortgage, that safe full of money wasn't so full any more. And remember, once again, he simply COULD NOT get a regular job for some reason that I forget or was never mentioned.  So even though he KNEW the task force was looking for him, he had to start robbing banks again, as Willie Sutton said, "Because that's where the money is."

But the ride had to come to an end at some point - it was only a matter of time before somebody in Canada learned how to put an exploding dye pack into one of the money bags.  Or the task force would finally have some evidence against Whiteman, like if he left behind a stray fingerprint or something.  The important thing to know about working ANY job, even a bank robbing one, is to know when to call it quits.  Whiteman kept saying, "This will be the last job." followed by "No, THIS one will be the last job."  Well, guess what, you probably don't get to decide that, and the task force might have something to say about it, too. Still, maybe it's best to know when to say "When."

Also starring Josh Duhamel (last seen in "Shotgun Wedding"), Elisha Cuthbert (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Nestor Carbonell (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Swen Temmel (last seen in "Concrete Cowboy"), Keith Arthur Bolden (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Michael H. Cole (ditto), Dylan Flashner (last seen in "The Card Counter"), Olivia d'Abo (last heard in "Tarzan & Jane"), Claire Bronson (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), Eric J. Little, Jessica Luza (last seen in "Let's Be Cops"), Rachael Markarian (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Leander Suleiman (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker"), Ian Hoch (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Lorenzo Yearby, Chiara D'Ambrosio, Jacobi Hollingshed, Jason Vail (last seen in "Tammy"), Cooper Thornton (last seen in "The Ring Two"), Todd d'Amour (last seen in "C'mon C'mon"), Christina Bach (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Leslie Stratton, Dayna Beilenson (last seen in "Secret Headquarters"), Jerry Ascione (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), B.J. Winfrey, Greg Corbett (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Megan Hayes (last seen in "Zola"), Charlie Sara, Ashley Doughterty, Hannah Celeste, Packer Morley, Faisal Mahmood, Derek Severson, Clayton Landey (last seen in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"), Burns Burns (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Spence Maughon (last seen in "Fantastic Four" (2015)), Sherilan Lane, Haley Webb (last seen in "Blonde"), Mary DeMatteo with archive footage of Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Boy George (last seen in "Wham!"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 music videos (in the early days of MTV)