Critic Reviews

Saving Christmas will hold little interest for anyone not already a believer. It’s too single-minded in its instructional purpose, too averse to multidimensional characters, too youth-pastor-like in its dorky humor.

Beyond the leaps in logic, the most troubling part of this film is that it just feels like a defense of the excess of Christmas.

Saving Christmas seems determined to win any perceived war on Christmas through brute force.

This may be one of the least artful holiday films ever made. Even devout born-again Christians will find this hard to stomach.

Every holiday season sees a new influx of Christmas movies desperate to become the next big seasonal perennial destined to provide laughter, tears, humanity and healthy residuals for years to come.

A glorified infomercial in defense of the holiday that contains about 15 minutes of actual content padded out with almost an hour of filler.

An unholy mess co-produced by Cameron's faith-based Camfam Studios.

Preaching aside, though, Saving Christmas is a shoddy 80-minute feature that contains approximately 50 minutes of actual moving footage. When Cameron narrates that materialism doesn’t go against Christmas because it celebrates the son of God being made material himself, it sounds like a defense of any kind of cheap, poorly made holiday crap — this movie included.

Director Doane offers no storytelling pizzazz; the lighting is careless, the pacing is deadly, the occasional stabs at comedy fall flat. Ultimately, Saving Christmas has nothing to share that Linus Van Pelt didn't already say better on “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”