Director – Reginald Hudlin, Screenplay – Kelly Younger, Producers – Brian Grazer, Charisse Hewitt-Webster, Karen Lunder & Eddie Murphy, Photography – Newton Thomas Sigel, Music – Marcus Miller, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jon Farhat, Visual Effects/Animation – Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisor – Jason Snell, Animation Supervisor – Maia Kayser), Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Nicholas Daniels), Special Effects Supervisor – Mark Hawker, Production Design – Aaron Osborne. Production Company – Imagine Entertainment/Big Indie Pictures.
Cast
Eddie Murphy (Chris Carver), Tracee Elliss Ross (Carol Carver), Jillian Bell (Pepper), Madison Thomas (Holly Carver), Genneya Walton (Joy Carver), Thaddeus J. Mixson (Nick Carver), Nick Offerman (Pip), Chris Redd (Lamplighter Gary), Robin Thede (Cordelia), David Alan Grier (Santa Claus), Ken Marino (Bruce), Danielle Pinnock (Kit Kleiman), Timothy Simons (Emerson Turner), D.C. Young Fly (Josh), Anjelah Johnson-Reyes (Shelly), Lombardo Boyar (Scott), Travente Rhodes (Tre)
Plot
On Candy Cane Lane in El Segundo, Chris Carver is an eager competitor in the annual competition for the house with the best Christmas decorations. Just as he prepares for this year’s Christmas celebrations, Chris learns that he has been laid off at work. At the same time, Chris learns that the local tv station is offering a $100,000 prize for the best decorated house. Determined to win it, he goes searching for decorations and comes across a Christmas store run by the strange Pepper. She sells him an extraordinary light-up diorama of the 12 Days of Christmas, for which Chris is required to sign a lengthy receipt. The instruction manual requires that he make a wish, which he does – that he win the Christmas competition. However, the morning after he premieres the diorama and wows that tv crew, he finds all the decorations on it are missing and his yard overrun with swans. On a return to the Christmas store, he is informed by the tiny living ornaments that Pepper keeps that she is a rogue Christmas elf gone bad and that he has signed a contract – if he does not find the five gold rings Pepper specified in her rhyme then he will be turned into one of the living ornaments like them.
There was a time when Eddie Murphy was once one of the funniest guys on Earth. Murphy hit stardom early in the 1980s and passed through a string of film hits such as 48 Hrs. (1982), Trading Places (1983), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Coming to America (1988) and The Nutty Professor (1996). Some of Murphy’s films from the 1990s came out more mixed – a string of Beverly Hills Cop sequels, Boomerang (1992), The Distinguished Gentleman (1992), Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), Holy Man (1998). Even when he was appearing in dogs like The Golden Child (1986), The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002), I Spy (2002) and Norbit (2007), Murphy’s raucous personality and remarkable penchant for disguise is the most energetic and entertaining thing on screen.
On the other hand, Murphy from around the 2000s is someone who started to find a far too comfortable place in family entertainment with the likes of Dr. Dolittle (1998), as the voice of the Donkey in Shrek (2001) and sequels, Daddy Day Care (2003), The Haunted Mansion (2003), Imagine That (2009) and A Thousand Words (2012). It feels as though that decade collectively watered down the wild and crazy Eddie Murphy we once had. For the 2010s, Murphy has been noticeably absent, turning up only in the well-acclaimed Dolemite is My Name (2019) and atypical works like the drama Mr Church (2016) and the ensemble romantic comedy You People (2023). The 2020s sees Murphy trying to return to familiar ground with a sequel Coming 2 America (2021) that everyone shrugged and promptly forgot and a just-announced Beverly Hills Cop tv series.
Candy Cane Lane is Eddie Murphy making a Christmas comedy. This is a genre that has length history – I used to cover Christmas films under fantasy (see Christmas Films) but these days every holiday season is overrun by a tide of saccharine tv movies and I avoid the genre with the exception of Christmas horror movies. I make an exception to cover Candy Cane Lane because it is Eddie Murphy, is backed by Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and is being given big promotion even though it was only released on Amazon Prime.
Eddie Murphy and daughter Madison Thomas enter the magic Christmas shop
The whole Christmas theme – being introduced to Eddie hand-crafting Christmas ornaments, a big competition over houses on a street decorated with Christmas lights (an almost entirely American phenomenon) and some really bad covers of Christmas carols on the soundtrack did nothing for me at all. Even though he produces the film, Eddie Murphy doesn’t get much opportunity to open and do much of his classic thing – he’s stuck more in the softer family man Eddie Murphy mode we had in Imagine That and A Thousand Words. Indeed, some of the scenes here with Eddie being chased around the backyard by a swam or chasing chickens through a warehouse seem a long way down from the Eddie Murphy funny guy we had at his heights in Beverly Hills Cop. The crucial thing you feel is that fairly much any actor could have been cast in Eddie’s role here and it have changed little about the film – I could really see this playing out as a Tim Allen film, for instance.
The film does perk up with the introduction of the scene-stealing living ceramic dolls and their assorted antics. Even so, Candy Cane Lane feels overlong with its two-hour runtime and gets dragged out around too many protracted comedy sequences – the aforementioned chase through a factory, or one set around a track meet and the Lords-a-Dancing. It feels as though the film, had it been given a theatrical release as opposed to a streaming one where length does not matter as much, would have been trimmed down to a more acceptable 90 minute length or thereabouts. I am not sure if that would have made it significantly funnier but it would have been less draggier in the middle. The film does get itself together for an amiably frenetic climax – with an appearance from David Alan Grier as Santa Claus, no less.
