The “Tough Guy Santa” genre

Santa Claus has long had the image of a gentle old man with a big smile and a jolly laugh, but in recent years, Hollywood has produced a number of Christmas movies that reimagine Santa as, quite frankly, a bit of a badass.

In The Christmas Chronicles, Kurt Russell plays a fit, cool Santa who wears leather and sunglasses and ends up doing a jazz number in a prison cell! To be honest, I enjoy Russell’s Santa (and the movie overall), but it’s definitely a move away from the traditional Santa and toward a more modern, cooler and tougher version of Old Saint Nick.

While The Christmas Chronicles was still a heartwarming, family-friendly PG-rated movie, 2022’s R-rated Violent Night took Santa to a whole new level with David Harbour playing a Santa who doesn’t hesitate to kill bad guys in order to save Christmas.

This year brought us a new tough guy Santa movie, Red One, starring lots of big names like Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, and Lucy Liu. J.K. Simmons plays Nick, a suave iron-pumping Santa who actually spends most of the movie trapped and unconscious while Johnson’s Callum Drift, Santa’s bodyguard, runs around beating up bad guys to find out who kidnaped his boss. Red One has a PG-13 rating and features plenty of beat-’em-up action but no actual killing (unless you count snowmen). After watching this movie at the cinema yesterday, I started thinking…

Just as our superheroes have become darker, grittier, and more flawed, so too does Santa seem to be changing in modern times as the world itself seems to be getting darker. As entertainment, I like all of the movies mentioned above, but honestly I’m also starting to feel a little uncomfortable with this new genre.

Christmas is supposed to be a time of peace, forgiveness, and good will, and Santa Claus is a symbol of wonder, joy, kindness, and also wisdom, not violence. So, as much as I enjoy a good beat-’em-up action movie, it feels somehow wrong to also make it a Christmas movie. What do you think? Is there room for a tough guy Santa in your list of favourite Christmas movies?

(By the way, if you still haven’t seen the animated Christmas movie called Klaus, I highly recommend it!)