Shot from the film Adventures of S. Nicholas
The protagonist of the picture is a second-grader Artem (Maxym Luchak), who, together with his parents and elder sister (Ivanna Boroday) move to inherited from their grandmother Hutsul manor in the snowy Carpathians. A father (popular Polish actor Przemysław Cypryański) has made a computer game, which he can’t sell. That’s why he is forced to condemn his family to some kind of Hutsul downshifting. Mom (Masha Efrosinina) is not pleased with such changes at all because she’s an editor of a fashion blog, and how can she deal with the fashion in this region of spruces and snow peaks? The sister is even less satisfied. All the time she makes up an American life for her girlfriends on Skype. Everyone’s fighting, mom and dad are going to divorce, and only Artem with tears in his eyes asks St. Nicholas to save his family. So St. Nicholas rushes to the rescue in reactive blue-yellow sleds with a funny song on his lips (Grigoriy Bokovenko).
The director of the film is Semyon Gorov, whom the Ukrainian TV viewer knows for the famous winter musicals Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, Cinderella and Adventures of Verka Serduchka.
Adventures of S. Nicholas is a film debut for him.
Shot from the film Adventures of S. Nicholas
However, it seems that the director decided not to waste efforts on the new genre and made the film out of worked-out television methods. That is again we have a New Year’s show, only on the big screen. As for songs (including ones by O`Torvald band), there is not enough of them for a full musical. On the other hand, the plot and dialogues have remained at the “TV level”, that is, as small sketches between songs. Therefore, actors don’t always know how they should act: whether they are conditional singing characters, or real people with their own, albeit funny problems? The same Efrosinina, for example, fixes one and the same twisted with malice face expression and keeps it almost to the very finale. In contrast but in the same way Cypryański shines with intelligent eyeglasses.
And everything would be bad if not Vasyl Virastyuk. Probably, he is the main surprise of the whole film. The two-time winner of the strongest person in the world title has played the role of the main antagonist – chimney burglar Mykola, nicknamed “Kaban”(Bore – translator’s note), who, on the eve of St. Nicholas Day, wears the coat of the upper mentioned Nicholas and falls into Artem’s house when his parents rushed to the hospital, because ill-fated daddy had fallen from the ladder and was injured.
Shot from the film Adventures of S. Nicholas
Of course, the episodes of Kaban fighting with kids are following the legendary American Home Alone, but whatever it may be, our strongman appeared to have quite decent comedy talent. His whims in the company of the kids are sometimes really funny, his life drama is quite touching. And since the authors of the film are still focusing not on film critics, but on the family audience, that is, first of all on children, therefore it will have its viewers.
Gorov and his producers declared that they wanted nothing less than to revive Nicholas as a Ukrainian symbol of Christmas holidays. It’s a good and decent goal – but to achieve it, we should have a normally functioning genre of entertaining films. So far, it remains the younger brother of TV shows.
Shot from the film Adventures of S. Nicholas
But there is always hope. Already on January 3, 11 children from Morshyn is going to be released. It’s also a family film about the fight against evil people. The director of this film will be Arkadiy Nepytaliuk – the author of a really funny comedy Pryputni.
However, Virastyuk won’t be there.
Dmytro Desyateryk, The Day – specially for opinionua.com