Starring: Will Ferrell, Edward Asner, Bob Newhart

6 out of 10 stars

We all have a general idea of what Christmas elves are like. They're tiny, they're happy, they're industrious, and if you grew up watching Herbie the aspiring dentist elf in the Rankin-Bass TV special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (or reading David Sedaris' The Santaland Diaries), they're kinda gay. But I don't think it crossed anyone's mind that they were infantile or socially retarded. Insanely cheerful, yes; mentally prepared for kindergarten but not much more, no. And despite the fact that he's sometimes very funny, Will Ferrell's Buddy the Elf (in Elf) comes across more as the slow kid in the elf class rather than just the tall one. Well, slow's not the right word – outright dumb works a little better. Though he's a whiz with scissors and paper, he's something like the Rain Man of elfdom, an idiot savant whose talents lie in Martha Stewart-style decorating and toymaking.

Which isn't to say Elf is an entirely frivolous experience. With its heart in the right place and a memory steeped in the aforementioned Rankin-Bass holiday cartoons, Elf is a routinely passable exercise in family moviemaking. It ladles on the schmaltz ever so gently, goes down easy and smooth, with just a trace of nourishment, but the overall taste is bland and beige, and never truly inspired. It's just kind of... there. With claymation credits and a perfect made-for-TV premise, Elf starts out breezily enough, with the tale of a young orphaned baby who crawls into Santa's sack and is promptly adopted by the North Pole community. However, once Buddy reaches his full 6-foot frame, problems start to arise, the biggest seeming to be that Buddy's productivity is lax and his yearly review could be in peril. (Insert joke about "downsizing" here.) Finding out the truth about his origins from Papa Elf (Bob Newhart, the driest elf ever) and Santa himself (Ed Asner in a bad beard), Buddy sets off to find his real dad, a cold-hearted New York businessman (James Caan) and stage a reunion.

Ferrell's dopey-elf act, funny in its first bits and pieces, wears after a while, and seems to go from gee-whiz to geez-how-stupid-is-he pretty quickly. It's not his fault – Buddy is certainly a wholly created character, on par the creations of other recent Saturday Night Live alums like Mike Myers and Molly Shannon. But like the Austin Powers movies, Elf wears out its welcome at about the halfway point (around the time Buddy starts asking total strangers what their favorite color is), though god knows it's not half as asinine as other SNL-style movies of late. In the hands of a director with a good eye for farce and the fantastical, Elf could have been riotous, but with an irony-free Jon Favreau (Made) at the helm, it's just a letdown of a movie, not to mention one of the ugliest, dingiest films in recent memory. Nobody could spare a couple bucks for some 409 to clean the sets, or a couple gallons of paint? And when did the snow in the North Pole go from whitish to grayish?

The trajectory of Elf is all too predictable: the movie's North Pole sequence remains its best, affectionately embracing all the Christmas TV staples (down to the cuddly talking animals) without mocking them too overtly. But when Buddy makes it to the big bad city, we're treated to a mélange of sad-sack-in-the-city montages. Watch Buddy play with the revolving door! See Buddy marvel at a diner that proclaims it has "The World's Best Cup of Coffee"! Even the movie's best potential set-up – Buddy turns the Christmas department of Gimbel's on its ear – is given short shrift, though for the world-weary adults in the audiences, 21st century Christmas spirit couldn't come in a better form than Zooey Deschanel in an elf costume. (Alas, she's a Gimbel's employee, not a true elf.) Sporting blonde hair and a surly demeanor that could make her Herbie the Elf's existentialist twin sister (the one who'd want to backpack in Europe before slouching towards dental hygiene as a career), Deschanel charms even with monosyllabic lines and briefly sends Christmas spirits soaring with a singing-in-the-shower rendition of "Baby It's Cold Outside." More of that and even the Scroogiest of us all would believe reindeer could fly.