Tim Allen's performance as Santa Claus/Scott Calvin seemed more like how Tim Allen would act if he were Santa Claus, which works for this movie, as that is, in fact, the premise.
Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause is the story of how Jack Frost (Martin Short) tries to get a holiday for himself by stealing Christmas from Scott Calvin (Tim Allen) and becoming Santa Claus, himself. In an interesting parallel to his character, Martin Short steals the show by pulling off a wonderful performance as the trouble-making Jack Frost.
Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause has Scott Calvin juggling the demands of being Santa Claus and being a good husband to his wife, Carol Calvin/Mrs. Claus (Elizabeth Mitchell), who is pregnant and is due to deliver her baby around the same time as Christmas, Santa's busy season. In addition, Carol is going stir crazy with nothing but elves around her; she is desperately longing to see her family (or any tall people, for that matter) for Christmas. Scott decides to have her family join them at the North Pole for Christmas, but has to make his cover story (that he runs a toy factory in Canada) believable. To do this, everyone in Elfburg helps to replace all of the signs in town with (ridiculously overly) Canadian-looking signs, the elves all wear hats and everyone adds an "eh?" to the end of every sentence. Everything may have worked out smoothly if it hadn't been for Jack Frost's meddling. After trying to upstage Santa and almost being decommissioned as a Legendary Character as his punishment, Frost convinces Santa that he will work off his debt by doing "Community Service" and helping Santa to get ready for Christmas. Of course, this merely gives ol' Frosty the chance to really foul things up. Comedy ensues.
Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause is a pretty good Christmas movie for the kiddies, and I enjoyed it, myself, so its appeal is not limited to the wee-folk. As you would expect, everything ends well, leaving Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause a feel-good movie in the end.
The Blu-ray version of Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause has additional special features that aren't on the DVD version: Virtual Home Decorator and a tour of Elfburg. The tour of Elfburg is a short trip around the center of town, and is all computer graphics specifically made for the video. In fact, the tour begins and ends with the entrance to Santa's Workshop, in a clean transition from the menu, as the menu's background is Santa's Workshop.
Much more impressive is the Virtual Home Decorator feature, which features a virtual Christmas tree, a virtual fireplace on which you can create and hang up to five virtual Christmas stockings and room decorations. The room decorations give you three themes to choose from, and then decorate the edges of the room accordingly, but the virtual tree and the virtual stockings let you show more creativity. These are cute items, but the one thing that might make this feature useful would have to be the jukebox feature. The jukebox holds eight songs: "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy", "Joy to the Beat", "We Wish You a Merry Christmas", "Deck the Halls", "Jingle Bells", "The Twelve Days of Christmas", "Silent Night", and "O Tannenbaum". You can create a playlist of up to eight songs and then start the music and the list will repeat continuously, setting the mood for your Christmas celebrations. The music can be listened to on all of the pages inside of the Virtual Home Decorator; you don't have to leave it on the jukebox to listen to the music. I did notice, however, that the music stops briefly when changing from one menu to the next.
The Blu-ray version also features a Movie Showcase, the filmmaker's most cinematic moments, showcasing the ultimate in high definition picture and sound. Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause has only three of these scenes, but they do look quite brilliant.
In addition to these new special features, this version also has all of the original DVD Features, including: Blooper Reel, Alternate Opening, Jack Frost and Mrs. Claus: A Very Different Look, The New Comedians: On Set with Tim & Marty, Creating Movie Magic, Christmas Carol-oke, and Greatest Time of Year - Music Video With Aly & AJ. In particular, I loved watching the featurette on the changes to the Jack Frost and Mrs. Claus characters - especially the Jack Frost part. It was neat to see the difference between the original costume intended for Jack Frost and the final version. What is more interesting is seeing, side-by-side, Martin Short's performance as Jack Frost. The difference in the two performances are striking, and each is befitting of their respective costumes. Essentially, Martin was giving a good performance as the character that had been created by the wardrobe department, and it wasn't the character they actually wanted. When the costume was changed appropriately, Martin Short was able to deliver the Jack Frost character in the more sinister, menacing way in which he was intended to be.
The only part I would complain about was the special effects used when two people were thawed out in the movie. The computer graphics for the rest of the movie were pretty good, but that particular effect looked like it could have been done by a novice using Photoshop; the actors shook like they were shaking off the frost, while an overlay was (badly) broken up, moved as if it were falling off and made to fade away. Sadly, this is at the movie's conclusion, leaving very little remaining running time to try to distract you and make you forget just how lame that particular effect was.
Overall, Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause is an interesting mix of The Santa Clause, It's a Wonderful Life and The Year Without a Santa Claus. Thanks to Martin Short's performance, it definitely is worthy of being added to anyone's Christmas movie collection and makes a nice holiday rental for the season.
