Elf review – Will Ferrell is still Santa’s biggest helper in Christmas comedy favourite

Twenty years on, this has become a canonical Christmas comedy favourite. A jovial seasonal treat, from director Jon Favreau and screenwriter David Berenbaum, Elf was reportedly inspired by Tom Hanks in Big, but took on a life of its own once Will Ferrell became involved, improvising many of his lines and endowing the whole thing with a more ironised manic energy.

The film’s old-fashioned charm and sweet-natured Yuletide spirit has held up, although it interestingly seems attractive now more for these softer-edged qualities than for the straight-ahead SNL-type Will Ferrell comedy that it seemed to promise back in 2003, when Ferrell’s presence led us all to expect (and often get) something more vinegary and satirical, like Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa.

Ferrell plays the grotesquely huge elf called Buddy in his green coat and pointy hat, far bigger than all the other elves because, in fact, he is human; he was a poignantly unwanted orphan baby that crept into Santa’s present sack and was accidentally carried back to the North Pole as a stowaway. Santa (played by Ed Asner) had no choice but to employ him as one of his own little helpers, a job for which he is horribly unsuited; Bob Newhart is droll as the senior elf who volunteers to raise this very “special” elf child.

As a big maladroit adult, Buddy must make the journey of his life, right back to New York City to meet the dad who abandoned him and who now lives with a new family; this comprises grumpy, Scrooge-ish publisher Walter Hobbs, played by a harassed James Caan, his wife Emily (Mary Steenburgen) and teen son Michael (Daniel Tay). Buddy gets a job at a department store as a Christmas elf where he falls in love with the manic pixie dream template herself, Zooey Deschanel, as Jovie, who also has to dress as an elf.

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Ferrell plays Buddy with more innocence than I remember, rather underplaying the tacit “developmental challenge” gags of his persona, although he certainly goes for, and gets, big laughs as he becomes screamingly overexcited in the store at the thought of Santa’s imminent appearance and then enraged at the realisation that this “Santa” is a fake. And it is hilarious when poor innocent Buddy is delighted to meet Peter Dinklage’s character, whom he infuriates by calling an elf. There are some oddities as well, such as the strange “Central Park Rangers”, like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, who chase Santa and Buddy in the final scene in Central Park, embittered by being put on the naughty list. It’s always a post-lunch Christmas treat.

• Elf is released on 1 December in UK cinemas.