The Family Man (126 mins, 12) Directed by Brett Ratner; starring Nicolas Cage, Téa Leoni, Don Cheadle
Pokémon 2000 (102 mins, PG) Directed by Kunohiko Yuyama
Merlin: the Return (88 mins, PG) Directed by Paul Mathews; starring Rik Mayall, Tia Carrere, Patrick Bergin
Ernest Hemingway famously remarked that 'all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn'.
By the same token, you could say that all Christmas movies come from one book by Charles Dickens called A Christmas Carol. Every Yuletide is the turn of the Scrooge, who this year takes the form of Dr Seuss's killjoy in The Grinch and Wall Street magnate Jack Campbell in The Family Man.
The Family Man opens in 1987 when Jack (Nicolas Cage), at the check-in counter for his flight to London, resists the pleas of his lovely girlfriend Kate (Téa Leoni) to remain Stateside and marry her. 'You've got a scholarship at a great law school and I've got this internship at Barclays,' he says and departs.
Cut to 13 years later and our hero has been turned by those hard-faced British bankers at Barclays from gentle Jack into Gordon Gekko. He's now a ruthless Manhattan arbitrageur, living in a luxurious bachelor pad and planning a multi-billion-dollar merger in the health sector.
'You're a credit to capitalism, Jack,' the company's admiring chairman tells him, and so important is his work-in-hand that Jack orders his underlings to assemble on Christmas Day at their Wall Street headquarters.
On the way back to his flat on Christmas Eve, Jack encounters a young black criminal, Cash (Don Cheadle), whom we soon recognise to be the local manifestation of Jacob Marley's ghost, or of Clarence, the second-class angel in It's a Wonderful Life.
This numinous stranger is the man who'll give him a glimpse of an alternative life and, sure enough, Jack wakes up on Christmas morning in a dreary, lower-middle-class New Jersey suburb married to his old love, Kate, and with two small children. Instead of fashionable art works by Francis Bacon and Cy Twombly on his walls, he's surrounded by kitsch. The $3,000 suits in his wardrobe have been replaced by the cheap plaid shirts and the denim jacket with his name on it that he wears as chief tyre salesman at Big Ed's, his father-in-law's garage. His new friends are ineffably vulgar, preferring beer to fine wines, hamburgers to gourmet foods and bowling alleys to the ski-slopes at Aspen.
As Jack finds his way in this strange new world, there are amusing incidents, especially the idea of his six-year-old daughter thinking he's an extraterrestrial in need of guidance. And Cage's James Stewart-type cadences would make us think of Frank Capra's take on A Christmas Carol, even if we hadn't noted the obvious parallels with It's a Wonderful Life.
Jack's experience is, in fact, that of Capra's George Bailey turned on its head - this is the life he might have led had he become an ordinary, small-time guy and stayed at home. Where it's supposedly superior to his life in the metropolitan fast-lane is that he has love, a family and warm friendships.
We later discover that Kate, who, in the alternative New Jersey life, is an idealistic pro bono lawyer, has become in her 'real' life a hard, power-dressing, unmarried, big-time corporate attorney.
Predictably, having had his glimpse of what it would have been like to be a suburban Bob Cratchit, this Manhattan Scrooge returns to affluent Wall Street determined to be a kinder, more caring man. The film obviously springs from, and salves, the dodgy consciences of Hollywood moguls.
They are cynical, avaricious people who produce films proclaiming the rewards of the simple life and denouncing materialism in a society where the gap between rich and poor is growing ever wider. The film's moral is that it's OK to be rich and happy, provided you occasionally pay a little lip service to those who are poor and happy. So Tinseltown feels better after imbibing the very brew that it distils.
Christmas charity should dictate restraint in dealing with the other two movies. But a stern, little voice inside me says: 'Bah! Humbug!' Pokémon 2000 is a poorly animated, badly written, scarcely comprehensible tale of an American lad called Ash becoming 'the chosen one' to confront a wicked Pokémon collector and find three treasures representing fire, ice and lightning that will save the world from extinction. It may make more sense in the original Japanese version, though I doubt it.
'The chosen one' in Merlin: the Return is, naturally, King Arthur (Patrick Bergin). Along with other denizens of Camelot, he's been awoken from Merlin's 1,500-year-old spell by an interfering modern scientist (Tia Carrere), and once more he battles with Mordred to save the world.
In the title role, Rik Mayall, who probably seeks to emulate Nicol Williamson's exasperated Merlin in John Boorman's Excalibur, struggles with a hopeless script and inept direction.
The film looks terrible from its first shot and when early on someone says: 'Guinevere, move your arse and pass the wine', you know there's no hope.
Why this witless film, a co-production between Britain and South Africa, didn't go straight to video is a mystery. I'd have called it bad beyond belief, except that these past two years British films have been so bad we have come to believe in their infinite awfulness.
