Starring Tim Allen, Martin Short, and Elizabeth Mitchell. Rated general. For showtimes, please see page 79

Go ahead. Put me on the naughty list. I’ve seen The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and I’m a sucker for Jack Frost. Alas, that’s not the family film’s intention.

Walt Disney’s third installment in Tim Allen’s hugely popular Santa Claus franchise pits St. Nick’s cuddly altruism against Jack Frost’s lean, hungry capitalism for Christmas supremacy. We’re supposed to embrace the familial harmony and selflessness being ?celebrated in director Michael Lembeck’s nice film (shot partly in Vancouver). And yet we can’t help but notice that Frost’s dazzling, fun-fair reimagining of the North Pole—“Shave a ?reindeer for $5!”—garnered more giggles than Santa’s humbler mom-and-pop enterprise.

That reaction is likely not evidence we’re doomed, soulless consumers. It’s because Frost is played by the incorrigible Martin Short, who can’t help but render the fat guy in the red suit as bland as sugarless cocoa. Whether fretting about toy production, his heavily pregnant wife (Elizabeth Mitchell), or the chilly in-laws (a winning Ann-Margret and Alan Arkin) he has transported—along with his ex-wife’s family—to the North Pole, Allen’s likable Everyman Santa has become a tad too much like our kvetching coworker in the next cubicle to feel truly magical. Some may also rue the absence of the calm, white-haired Mrs. Claus of legend in favour of Mitchell’s needy, blond sugarplum who threatens to deliver before Santa can.

Frost, on the other hand, really yanks up his Christmas socks. A dandy sporting a periwinkle suit and a hairdo resembling a frozen white hedgehog, he puts the sin back in Sinterklaas, dripping charm like icicles. He’s also the only cast member who says eh? properly when, in a delightfully silly nod to our native land, the North Pole is disguised as a Canadian toy factory (for reasons you can discover). Suffice it to say, Frost, Santa, his winsome niece Lucy (Liliana Mumy, Billy’s daughter), and a zillion adorable elves in striped leggings run the fun, fantastical plot’s gauntlet amid a glittering winter wonderland that’s both gloriously Christmassy and Canadian. Doing Canucks prouder, however, is the scene wherein Short, swinging a Santa Claus hat by its bobble, out-Lizas Miss Minnelli in a showstopping version of “North Pole, North Pole”. This delicious maple-leaf ham could finagle the Easter Bunny’s job too, and we’d only rejoice in the streets. King of the Chill, indeed.