You, Too, Can Hate Elf Bowling

It’s always suspicious when a movie is based on a video game. When a movie is based on a video game that basically doesn’t have a plot, you should probably just avoid it. The original Elf Bowling was a Windows game in 1998. Santa was bowling. The elves were pins. There were a few distractions and things. And that was our story. There’s a plot to the second that seems at least vaguely associated with this movie, but it is still, when you get right down to it, a bowling game.

So in this version, Santa got his start as Santa Maria Clausewitz Kringle (Joe Alaskey), a pirate. Who captures ships and steals their toys because why not, and then there’s a mutiny and he ends up at the North Pole where the elves like to make toys unless they’re unhappy so he becomes Santa and keeps the elves happy and that’s when we find out that this movie starts 1400 years ago. Cut to the current day, and Santa’s former pirate loser brother Dingle (Tom Kenny) has a plan to take over Christmas.

This movie, friends, is bad. So bad. Extremely bad. I do not like it. I dislike it so much I’m not sure where to start telling you what’s wrong with it. I guess the animation, because this animation is worse than that in multiple video games that I play, and I am not exactly a hardcore gamer. Disney Dreamlight Valley is looking at the visuals of this movie and saying, “Step up your game.” Like, even when the characters are literally phasing into one another, they look better.

The plot? It makes no sense. My twelve-year-old woke up while I was watching it, stared at it fuzzily, and demanded to know what the hell was going on, and I could not, particularly, tell him. As the movie continued, I continued to not know what it was trying to do. There was some partnership with Santa and the elves, which involved a very lengthy contract oh and also slamming unions kind of out of the blue, in case you want something else to hate about this movie.

I don’t know who this is for. I hated it. My kids hated it. Oh, neither of them watched it all the way through, but also neither of them said, “Hey, Mom, we should watch that again sometime.” They don’t want to watch it; I don’t want to watch it. There’s a whole thing where it goes to Fiji where the chief sounds weirdly like Laurence Welk and is also voiced by Joe Alaskey because they only hired four voice actors, if that makes you hate it more. I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.