Santa's not so little helper

In the first few minutes of Jon Favreau's funny Christmas movie I learned that gnomes are alcoholics and trolls aren't toilet-trained. This makes them both inappropriate employees for Santa Claus's North Pole toy factory. Elves, however, are willing workers, polite and generally happy, who will labour all year round creating toys for those children who haven't made it onto Santa's "naughty" list.

Buddy (Will Ferrell) is not only the least-productive elf but also something of a liability. Three times the size of his fellow workers and slower at assembling an Etch-A-Sketch, he is falling woefully behind.

When his adoptive father (Bob Newhart) tells him that he is, in fact, human, he is sent to America to discover his true identity and track down his father, cynical children's book publisher Walter Hobbs (James Caan).

Once adrift in New York, Buddy becomes a kind of cross between Crocodile Dundee and Tom Hanks in Big: an overgrown child in a silly costume trying to make sense of a cold, cruel world. Spurned by his father - until a blood test reveals the truth of paternity - Buddy gets a job in Santa's Grotto in Gimbels department store, where he alternately causes chaos and constructs breathtaking decorations with bewildering speed.

While his plotting may leave a little to be desired, Favreau directs with speed, humour and efficiency. And by keeping back the special effects until the end, when Santa's sleigh crashlands in Central Park and then struggles to escape the Central Park Rangers, he manages to deliver an old-fashioned Christmas movie for very young children with a built-in nostalgia quotient for adults.