'Dear Santa' Review: The Farrelly Brothers Drag Christmas to Hell

The biggest mystery of Dear Santa, the Paramount+ streaming comedy written by Ricky Blitt and Peter Farrelly and directed by Bobby Farrelly, is who, if anyone, it’s actually meant for. The plot revolves around Liam (Robert Timothy Smith), an overweight, dyslexic 11-year-old dork with glasses who writes a letter to Santa but accidentally addresses it to “Satan.” Satan (Jack Black) gets the letter and offers Liam three wishes in exchange for his soul. Predictably, Liam uses the wishes to awkwardly woo a girl, Emma (Kai Cech), help his friend Gibby (Jaden Carson Baker) get orthodontic work, and try to save his parents’ crumbling marriage.

This premise could work as a goofy, heartwarming Christmas film for Jack-Black-loving kids (which is all of them). Instead, the humor is so mean-spirited and tone-deaf that it feels like it’s aimed at adults who haven’t laughed since Matt Dillon made fun of Warren in There’s Something About Mary. I thought this might be harmless family fare for Thanksgiving, but within 35 minutes, my family mutinied. The middle-schoolers cringed at how unfunny it was, the exasperated adults were embarrassed for everyone involved, and the high-schooler only wanted to keep watching to revel in our collective suffering. (Teenagers are the worst.)

And somehow, it does get worse. The film crams in a baffling Post Malone concert sequence, has Gibby fake having cancer, and drops a dark twist about Liam’s parents grieving the death of their other child. The tonal whiplash is violent enough to break someone’s spine. Bobby Farrelly, it seems, thought he could repackage third-rate ’90s Farrelly Brothers humor for a tween audience but the result is a grotesque Frankenstein of fart jokes, curse words, and schmaltzy subplots that appeal to absolutely no one. The comedy is too juvenile for adults, too crass for kids, and too painfully unfunny for anyone with more than 16 brain cells. Even the extended fart joke in the trailer — one of the only gags that almost works — drags on so long it overstays its welcome.

Jack Black’s performance as a charming Satan should have been a slam dunk, but not even he can save Dear Santa. It’s hard to tell why he agreed to this. Was it a favor to the Farrelly brothers, because he didn’t owe them one: Their last collaboration, Shallow Hal, may be the worst film of his career. Unsurprisingly, Paramount seems just as embarrassed, dumping the film onto streaming with no marketing, and Black’s only visible promotion has been an unceremonious trailer drop on his Instagram.

Dear Santa is a film that no one will enjoy. It’s a relic of an out-of-touch comedy duo who seem to think comedy stopped evolving in 1999 but that maybe middle-school kids would be too dumb to notice.