My Review of "Fatman"

Fatman came out quietly last year in 2020. I thought it was a fun concept but I didn't think that it was worth paying full price of admission to watch it. Recently it's been added to the Amazon Prime streaming service so I gave it a try. I wasn't wrong about this movie.

The movie starts off with a rich little brat by the name of Billy. He's an overachieving kid that usually gets his way. Even though those methods might be a little underhanded. There's a little side story about Billy wanting to win a science fair competition at his school. He's one practically all of them in the past so it seemed like he's a shoe in.

This is where we see what kind of person Billy is when he loses the contest to another classmate. He stoops to some pretty absurd lows to get a win. The movie tries to make us have some empathy for him by mentioning that he has absent parents but that doesn't excuse the way he acts.

On the other end of the movie there's Chris who is our Santa Claus. He's become surly about the holidays. The real comedy is this absurd depiction of Chris. Apparently he and the rest of the Santa crew get some subsidies from the government for every Christmas holiday.

Last year he didn't deliver that many toys to kids around the world because they've been naughty. Due to the lower number of toy production the subsidies have been withheld and now Chris is trying to figure out how to get money to keep the Santa factory going. I like this premise it's pretty fun and quirky.

Anyways Billy gets really angry at Santa when he receives coal for Christmas. He is so vengeful that he hires a hitman to kill Santa. I know it's a crazy story and that's what it's going for. It's the dark comedy of the movie and I get it. Nothing in this movie should be taken seriously. It's a clever little twist to the holiday genre.

I think this movie had a ton of potential but they don't really go deeper into the Santa Claus lore. The old carol goes, "he knows when you are sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows when you are bad or good," so how is he not going to know someone is trying to assassinate him? It would have been way more interesting if he could tell what's coming and was able to thwart assassins in this manner.

This would also require a lot more interesting methods in which our mean assassin was to try to take out Santa. As a result I thought that the methods in which the assassin goes after Santa was a little on the weak side. I was hoping for more of a complicated scenario where he kind of outthinks Santa.

There's this big fight at the climax of the movie and it is kind of fun. It's gruesome and something you would never expect from a Santa film. Although I thought a lot of the concepts were pretty funny I didn't really have that laugh out loud moment. I almost forgot about the movie right after I saw it.

Overall, this is made to be a dark comedy for the Christmas holidays. I found that it fell short on a lot of the potential that it had. The performances were well done but the execution and the content needed some revisions. I unfortunately have to give this movie a 5 out of 10. They should rework this movie again because I really think this is an interesting concept that could be used in the future.