Arthur Christmas

An absolutely disastrous piece of work, Arthur Christmas details the chaos that ensues in the North Pole after a little girl’s present slips through the cracks on Christmas Eve and goes undelivered – with the film subsequently following the title character (James McAvoy) as he and a few volunteers embark on a quest to ensure that the kid gets her gift. It’s clear right from the get-go that Arthur Christmas has been geared exclusively towards very small children, as the film boasts a slick, fast-paced sensibility that seems to have been designed to mask its complete and utter emptiness (ie there’s just nothing here for viewers over a certain age). The film’s pervasively underwhelming atmosphere is perpetuated by the inclusion of several eye-rollingly misguided sequences (eg Santa and a few elves are trapped inside a child’s bedroom), with the resulting lack of momentum ensuring that the episodic midsection, which revolves primarily around Arthur’s ongoing efforts at finding said little girl’s house, fares especially poorly and is, for the most part, nothing short of interminable. The increasingly action-oriented bent of Sarah Smith and Peter Baynham’s frenetic screenplay, coupled with the worst and most needless 3D on display in years, slowly-but-surely transforms Arthur Christmas into a seriously headache-inducing ordeal, with the end result an obvious low point in the Aardman Animations’ filmography (and this isn’t even taking into account the often unintelligible nature of many of the voice performances).

* out of ****