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Student's Review
by Peter Nathaniel Hoss (age 13)

The movie, The Santa Clause 2, is the quintessence of secular Christmas theme movies. It is filled with good natured humor and oldies style rock and roll Christmas music throughout as it deals with the dilemmas of work, time management, and family that are eventually solved.

The first problem is that Santa needs to find a wife before Christmas Eve or he will be de-santafied. He has very little time to find a bride as he is in the busiest time of the year with his job. But before he finds a solution to this problem another problem appears. Santa's son, Charlie, is on the naughty list.

Santa is torn between spending time at his job, spending time with his son, and the need to find a Mrs. Clause. He doesn't know how to leave the North Pole without a disruption in the toy assembly but his second elf in command comes up with an idea to make a duplicate of Santa while he is trying to help his son and hopefully find a wife.

In Santa's absence, the replacement Santa is making a mess of the naughty and nice list and is going to give every child a lump of coal for Christmas. After all, he reasons, kids all behave poorly. Christmas is looking like it is going to be a disaster while the real Santa is in plain clothes trying to find out why his son is behaving naughtily at school. Santa, alias Scott Calvin, is ready to give up being Santa and be with his son who needs him at this time. All these problems are linked together so that when he solves one of them the others are resolved.

The movie was filled with hilarious scenes that had fine family quality comedy such as when Charlie showed his half sister that his father was the real Santa she then suddenly asked, "Do I still get toys?" Children in the theater started saying that line over and over again. The North Pole scenes are full of slapstick comedy; whereas, the humorous scenes of the regular world are centered on typical events. In addition to the humor there are heart-melting scenes.

The soft rock and roll Christmas music was intricately interwoven throughout the entire movie making it upbeat and enjoyable.

The Santa Clause 2 has everything to make a splendid family comedy with the hope and joy of Christmas.