Christmas is just around the corner, and viewers are starting to turn to seasonal classics to get in the holiday spirit. With the release of Fallout Season 2 also close at hand, however, Netflix subscribers in particular are turning to an alternative, gritty take on Santa Claus featuring the Ghoul himself, Walton Goggins. Five years after its premiere, Fatman is a hit on the streaming platform this week, peaking at tenth on the film chart behind Todd Phillips‘s The Hangover trilogy, Bride Wars, and A House of Dynamite, among others, with Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein still leading the pack. The darkly comedic action film casts Goggins in another killer role as an assassin setting out to kill one of the most elusive targets there is — Chris Cringle (Mel Gibson).
Fatman follows a more grizzled and jaded Santa who, after years of delivering joy to boys and girls around the world, is weighing hanging up the coat due to the waning belief in him and the increasingly vicious behavior of the kids he visits. In a last-ditch effort to save his business, he’s forced into a contract with the U.S. military to create jet fighter components for a hefty sum. In the middle of all this, though, one particularly spoiled brat who received a lump of coal for Christmas hires Goggins’s ruthless assassin, Jonathan Miller, to take out St. Nick once and for all. Haunted by his own grudge against Santa, Miller engages in a battle of wits with Chris, who quickly shows that he’s no stranger to dealing with trespassers who have come for his head.
Written and directed by brothers Eshom and Ian Nelms, this darker alternative to the typical holiday fare wasn’t the best received by critics upon its release, earning a 43% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences weren’t as icy, however, cementing it as an action-packed, holly-jolly fan-favorite like Violent Night with an 84%. The Oscar-winning Gibson and Emmy-nominated Goggins lead a cast that also featured another Oscar nominee in Secrets & Lies star Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Ruth Cringle, Santa’s wife. Rounding out the bunch are Robert Bockstael, Eric Woolfe, Deborah Grover, Ekaterina Baker, Shaun Benson, and Bill Lake.
‘Fallout’ Season 2 Takes Walton Goggins to New Vegas
Next on the docket for Goggins is his much-anticipated return to the wasteland in Fallout Season 2, which will see The Ghoul and Lucy (Ella Purnell) make the journey to New Vegas and the Mojave Wasteland. After the climactic finale of Season 1, the duo has formed a reluctant partnership to track down Lucy’s father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), and get some much-needed answers about The Ghoul’s family. However, as the most recent trailer showed, their journey will be far more chaotic than expected as they get caught in the middle of a wasteland civil war. Between the Brotherhood of Steel, Caesar’s Legion, the enigmatic ruler of the Strip, Robert House (Justin Theroux), and the Deathclaws and other beasts roaming the wasteland, there will be chaos aplenty to navigate in and around one of the post-apocalypse’s most prolific settlements. It will all tie into the widely beloved Fallout: New Vegas in big ways, while still telling an original story.
Fatman is now streaming on Netflix. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on the biggest hit titles on streaming.
- Release Date
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November 13, 2020
- Runtime
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100 Minutes
- Director
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Eshom Nelms, Ian Nelms
- Writers
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Eshom Nelms, Ian Nelms
- Producers
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Danny McBride, Brandon James, Kyle Stroud, Todd Courtney, Gary Raskin, Nadine de Barros, Peter Touche, Jonathan Saba, Robert Menzies, Ben Rosenblatt, David Gordon Green, Bill Bromiley, Alastair Burlingham, Michelle Lang, Buddy Patrick, Jody Hill, Ryan R. Johnson, Lisa Wolofsky
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