In this Will Ferrell vehicle, a tiny orphan baby crawls out of his crib and into Santa’s toy bag one night while Santa is engaged in gobbling down the cookies the sisters have left out for him; when he reappears at Santa’s North Pole workshop, he is turned over to a superannuated elft (Bob Newhart) to raise. Some thirty years later, the six-foot-three Buddy (Ferrell) finally figures out that he is not really an elf (elves tend to stand around three feet tall, and are horrible workaholics when it comes to toys), and so, after finding out from his putative father that he is really the son of one Susan Wells (deceased) and her sometime inamorata Walter Hobbs, who know holds down an important position in a children’s-book publishing firm in New York, sets out to find his real father. Which brings him to New York, the incredibly self-centered Hobbs (James Caan), and Hobbs’s kindly and tolerant wife Emily (Mary Steenburgen) and sadly ignored son Michael (Daniel Tay). You take it from there.

I enjoyed the film, in the same way one can (if one is not diabetic) enjoy cotton candy, but, as someone once said, there wasn’t much “there” there. Probably the best scene was the one in which midget children’s author Mile Finch (Peter Dinklage) launches a raging attack on Buddy for referring to him as an elf. I also liked the climax, in which Buddy has to repair Santa’s sleigh’s JATO unit (necessary because the sleigh won’t fly by itself without an outpouring of Christmas spirit, notably missing in the modern world) in Central Park while being attacked by an elite unit of the NYPD (incensed at Santa because he put them on his “naughty” list in 1985 after a police riot at a Simon & Garfunkel concert), thus enabling Santa to deliver toys to nice children on that Christmas (hey, can anybody here say “Rudolph”???).

Oh, Buddy also finds a girl friend (Zooey Deschanel). Apparently being an elf doesn’t lead to incurable naivete, since the three of them, a year or so later, show up at the North Pole, appropriately dressed as elves, to visit surrogate grandpa Bob Newhart, in the last scene …

A pleasant film. Rent it.