There’s a fine line between being a parody of garish Christmas decorations and just being a garish Christmas decoration yourself. Candy Cane Lane falls on the wrong side of that line. Amazon thought they had holiday gold with a Christmas vehicle starring Eddie Murphy, and they may have been right under other circumstances. These circumstances are frosted with so much tacky and gooey excess that you can’t claw your way through it to find the nugget of warmth the film surely thinks it offers.

When the action is set on a street called Candy Cane Lane, presenting something understated may be a mission that’s doomed to fail. That’s not the street’s given name, but rather a holiday outfit it wears when every house on the street erects its most outlandish external decorations for a probably interminable five or six weeks starting in late November. The commitment is so extreme that a contest covered by the local news has grown up around it, such that the winning house earns a prize of $100,000. That’ll probably just barely cover the cost of the decorations.

Chris Carver (Murphy) is even more desperate to win than usual this year because he’s just been downsized from his job, weeks before Christmas. So he happens upon a mysterious Christmas-themed store where he purchases a lawn ornament that is the shape of a giant container of shoe polish. When he sets it up in his yard, it’s meant to reveal itself into a 12-storey pyramid that’s a bit like an oversized wedding cake, where each layer depicts one of the 12 gifts of the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” But because this store is run by a mischievous elf who has been cast out of Santa’s workshop (Jillian Bell), there’s a magical catch to it. The depicted gifts are going to come to life.

And so it is that Chris and his family – wife Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross), son Nick (Thaddeus J. Mixson) and daughters Joy (Genneya Walton) and Holly (Madison Thomas) – are going to have to tangle with, quite literally, six geese a-laying. That’s right, Carol gets dive-bombed by recently hatched eggs on her way to work one day. If Chris doesn’t collect the five golden rings by Christmas Eve, the naughty elf will miniaturise him and place him in her town of living porcelain dolls who have failed her tests in the past. Hey, at least they still have an inner life, even if they’re only 20 centimetres tall.

Candy Cane Lane has a crackerjack premise. No one’s done it before – a rarity when it comes to Christmas movies – and it presents all sorts of opportunities for Goosebumps-style mayhem. How little of that materialises in a satisfying way is disappointing. There’s some wobbly CGI here, and even when it’s not needed, watching a bunch of lords a-leaping in the middle of Joy’s track meet is just not what you hope it would be.

Reginald Hudlin’s film would fall into the realm of mild rather than major misfire if not for the fact that it is coated in such dripping gobs of Christmas schlock. It would be one thing if the parade of tastelessness on the titular street had just a single moment to rear its head in the narrative. We can stomach any display for three or four minutes. But this paean to red-and-green-coloured oneupsmanship is in the background of most daytime shots as well. There’s no escape from the worst cloying commercialism the holiday season has to offer.

Murphy could drag the film past its surface queasiness, but this is not prime Murphy, who could transform turds through sheer force of will, enthusiasm, and the desire to do anything for a laugh. Understandably at age 62, Murphy doesn’t want to be that guy anymore, and it shows. Picking up the slack, and mugging double time as a result, are the supporting performers, each of whom tries to be the funniest person on screen. Hudlin doesn’t rein them in, and, we can probably assume, encouraged their efforts.

And if you’re going to make a movie like Candy Cane Lane, can you at least make it 90 minutes? In the streaming era, where viewings are expected from couches and there’s no such thing as too much content, movies like this get bloated out to two hours for no discernible reason. In fact, you could probably execute this concept as a short film and it would work great. Unfortunately, short films don’t get eyeballs, and at Christmastime, when viewership numbers ring like cash registers for the streamers, the eyeballs are what count.

 

Candy Cane Lane is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.