‘Candy Cane Lane’ Review: Eddie Murphy Lights Up The Season With A Family-Friendly Holiday Comedy – His First Ever

Believe it or not, Eddie Murphy never has attempted to dive into the holiday movie genre in his 40-year-plus career in films, but with Candy Cane Lane he has found an ideal premise to add to his ever-growing filmography of family-friendly comedies along the lines of Daddy Day Care, Dr. Dolittle, and countless others.

He reunites after 30 years with his Boomerang director Reginald Hudlin, along with screenwriter Kelly Younger. The latter came up with the idea based on his own experiences growing up in El Segundo, CA, and spending time every Christmas on the real Candy Cane Lane, a local event created in 1949 showcasing a neighborhood that dazzles with its decorations, with each family trying to outdo the other in spectacular holiday fashion.

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It wasn’t much of a leap to invent an all-out special effects-driven action comedy fantasy around the setting, and that is exactly what they done. And between the miracle season for the El Segundo Little League team that became world champions this year and now Murphy’s first Christmas movie, this is big time for the quaint LAX-adjacent city.

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Murphy plays Chris Carver, a dad of three who just loves Christmas and gets into the spirit every year trying to one-up his neighbors with the coolest house on the block. But this year isn’t going so well as he has just been laid off from his job. Fortunately, his wife Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross) is up for a big promotion, but it has put a damper on the merriment, especially with daughter Joy (Genneya Walton) about to go off to college at Notre Dame (Dad wants her to go to his alma mater USC), and son Nick (Thaddeus J. Mixson) aiming to be a musician after high school.

Elementary school student Holly (Madison Thomas) is Daddy’s little girl, but this could be the last Christmas the group is all together, so no matter what gets in the way of this family (all with first names associated with yuletide spirit), they need to prevail. And when Chris finds out a TV show is offering a huge cash prize to the house with the best display, he decides this is the answer to losing his job.

A visit to Kringle’s, a somewhat mystical pop-up Christmas store sitting in the middle of nowhere under a freeway underpass, really gets his juices flowing when the enthusiastic proprietor Pepper (a very funny Jillian Bell) sells him on a “can’t miss” Zoetrope tree celebrating the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” He signs the receipt without reading the fine print, though, and will live to regret the purchase.

Nevertheless, when he finally lights it up for judging by Santa Claus, it does become the talk of the contest — until, of course, everything goes awry and the characters in the song come to life in menacing ways. Watch out for all those maids a-milking, the frenetic French hens, the partridge in the pear tree, 10 lords a-leaping. Well, you get the idea. Attempting to get his money back, Chris discovers that Pepper actually is an unhinged elf who captures human customers with a curse that can be cured only upon finding the five gold rings, an impossible task. He learns that if he doesn’t do so before the clock strikes the appointed time, he will be turned permanently into one of the ceramic villagers on display at Kringle’s, a group he meets who tell him their own sad stories of how they became trapped by Pepper.

With elements of off-the-wall seasonal comedies such as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Home Alone and Christmas with the Kranks, this one is tailor-made for Murphy’s talents — a comic actor who manages to keep it real and grounded without careening totally out of control. He is perfectly matched with Ross, who easily slips into the role of his understanding wife. Bell milks the villain bit for all its worth, and there is some terrific, mostly voice-over work from Nick Offerman, Robin Thede and Chris Redd as the villagers locked up in a Christmas town with no way out. Among the rest of the cast, Ken Marino has some nice moments as Chris’ competitive neighbor across the street.

Hudlin keeps it hopping and has a first-rate team behind the camera, including production design that aces the assignment and is guaranteed to get Prime Video’s family viewers in the holiday mood. That’s the only thing you really hope to achieve with this kind of movie, and that it does in entertaining fashion.

Producers of the Imagine Entertainment film are Murphy, Brian Grazer, Karen Lunder and Charisse Hewitt-Webster.

Title: Candy Cane Lane
Distributor: Prime Video
Release date: December 1, 2023 (steaming on Prime Video)
Director: Reginald Hudlin
Screenwriter: Kelly Younger
Cast: Eddie Murphy, Tracee Ellis Ross, Jillian Bell, Thaddeus J. Mixson, Genneya Walton, Madison Thomas, Nick Offerman, Chris Redd, Robin Thede, Ken Marino
Rating: PG
Running time: 1 hr, 48 min

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