BETTER WATCH OUT

REVIEWED - THE SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSEAN UNLUCKY pigeon, oblivious to the gruesome vista being unveiled before the nation's press, somehow made its way into the preview screening of this terrible, terrible film. The bird spent some time clinging precariously to the screen. It dallied in the aisle. It flung itself at the projection booth. But, sadly, at no point did it relieve itself on Tim Allen's head. That, I suppose, is my job.

If the two sequels to The Santa Clause have achieved anything - a doubtful supposition, you'll admit - they have managed to make that 1994 film, in which Allen, an ordinary Joe, became Father Christmas, look like a minor masterpiece. A small section of the original picture is replayed here and, when set beside the new film's cynical pantomime, the excerpt seems perfectly charming and surprisingly amusing.

The opening film in the (please, God) trilogy did, at least, know what it was about. A glance at The Escape Clause sets the viewer imagining an early script meeting in which half a dozen unworkable scenarios are rejected, before some arithmetically challenged bright spark suggests combining these several bad films together to make - he wrongly conjectures - one good one.

Mischievous Jack Frost, played by the never particularly welcome Martin Short, attempts to replace Santa as the figurehead of Christmas. Meanwhile Allen's in-laws, who still think their daughter's husband is a businessman, come visiting and, in the agreeable form of Ann-Margret and Alan Arkin, are asked to believe that the North Pole is Canada. While all this is going on, Mr and Mrs Clause are falling out over the bearded one's obsessive devotion to work. Other, equally worthless ideas abound.

The narrative befuddlement noted, there are more overpowering outrages a pigeon might quote as an excuse for doing his business on The Escape Clause. The perfunctory performances of Short and Allen are not the worst of it. The film's lowest point comes when we are asked to feel disgust as an ascendant Jack Frost turns The North Pole into a commercially driven theme park. I'm sorry? This in a film from Walt Disney?

"This junk is not what Christmas is all about," Allen fumes. They should put that on the poster.