Arnold Schwarzenegger is playing Santa Claus, while Alan Ritchson is playing the thief recruited to help him. So it appears Christmas has finally abandoned elves and moved directly to hiring extremely large action stars. Prime Video has released the first teaser for The Man With the Bag, a new Christmas action comedy directed by Adam Shankman. The film follows Santa after a rogue elf steals his magical bag. With Christmas approaching and apparently no useful security system at the North Pole, Santa turns to his naughty list and recruits Vance, a former thief played by Ritchson.
The pair must assemble a team of misfits, recover the bag and save Christmas before it is too late.
You know, the usual festive administration.
The film will arrive globally on Prime Video on 2 December. Awkwafina, Ken Jeong, Jane Krakowski, Kyle Mooney, Liza Koshy and Michael Cyril Creighton also appear in the cast. Prime Video . I for one, think that Schwarzenegger as Santa makes a strange amount of sense. Santa lifts an unreasonable number of presents, works through the night and somehow enters millions of homes without anybody successfully stopping him. He may wear red velvet instead of tactical equipment, but that is still an action hero’s workload. Schwarzenegger simply makes the situation more obvious.
And this is not his first experience with Christmas chaos.
In 1996, he starred in Jingle All the Way as Howard Langston, a father desperately searching for a Turbo-Man action figure on Christmas Eve. That film gave us Schwarzenegger fighting other parents, chasing a criminal Santa and discovering that buying one toy can apparently become more dangerous than most military operations. Thirty years later, he is no longer searching for the man in the red suit.
He is the man in the red suit.
That alone gives The Man With the Bag a rather lovely nostalgic hook. Anyone who grew up watching Jingle All the Way now gets to see Schwarzenegger promoted from an exhausted Christmas shopper to the person responsible for the entire holiday. I suppose surviving the Turbo-Man incident made him uniquely qualified.
Then we have Alan Ritchson. A guy who has spent several seasons playing Jack Reacher. Yes the same Reacher who is capable of solving almost any problem by studying the evidence and then walking through a wall. Ritchson is not actually playing Reacher here, of course. His character is a down-on-his-luck thief named Vance. But Prime Video knows exactly what viewers will see when he appears beside Santa. This is Christmas protected by the Terminator and a man who looks as though he could carry the sleigh when the reindeer need a break.
You gotta love it.
The premise also follows an increasingly popular Hollywood tradition of turning Christmas into an action genre. We have watched Santa fight armed criminals in Violent Night. Dwayne Johnson protect him in Red One. And countless families discover that December apparently attracts an alarming number of kidnappers, thieves and magical disasters. At some point, delivering presents quietly stopped being enough.
But The Man With the Bag appears to be leaning towards family adventure rather than sending Santa into another extremely violent workplace incident. The stolen bag gives the film the structure of a heist movie, except the people planning the job include the owner of the North Pole and a thief selected from the naughty list. That detail is particularly amusing. Santa has spent years recording everyone’s bad behaviour, and now he is finally putting the information to practical use. The naughty list was not merely about withholding presents. It was apparently a recruitment database waiting for the correct emergency.
Of course, this type of Christmas movie depends heavily on tone. Too much action and the festive warmth disappears. Too much sentiment and the entire heist begins to feel like an elaborate route towards a speech about believing in yourself. But Shankman may be a useful choice to keep the balance. His previous films include Hairspray, The Wedding Planner and Disenchanted. So he knows how to handle broad comedy, spectacle and characters who can begin dancing without the surrounding world collapsing.
The cast should also bring plenty of chaos. Awkwafina and Ken Jeong are not performers you hire when you want everyone to behave sensibly and complete the mission in silence. Still, the main attraction remains Schwarzenegger. There are some casting announcements that require time to understand. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Santa is not one of them. Put the beard on him, place him beside a sleigh and allow that unmistakable voice to explain why Christmas is in danger.
I’m already convinced.
Watch Teaser Here:
The Man With the Bag arrives on 2 December, giving Santa and his unusually muscular new assistant enough time to recover the presents.
The elves may have lost control of the situation.
But fortunately, Christmas has Reacher.
