Like an obese Santa grunting and wheezing as he hoists himself out of a low-sitting chair, so are the desperate gasps of Fred Claus as it runs through its creaky old Christmas-oriented sappiness and its slapdash story and its sub-Tim-Allen-level shtick. It''s like they took the most tiresome elements of 10 different holiday films and patched them together into one ugly quilt.

An ashamed and subdued Vince Vaughn plays the title character, a devil-may-care repo man who is jealous of the adoration that his brother Santa Claus (Paul Giamatti) gets for his yearly benevolence. It doesn''t help that Mom (Kathy Bates) always liked St. Nick best, too, ever since the boys were kids several hundred years ago. (It is "explained" -- by which I mean, a narrator says some words that are supposed to convince us -- that the magic of being a saint halts the aging process not just on the saint himself but on his spouse and immediate family members. I await the Vatican''s rebuttal.)

Fred has a faithful girlfriend, Wanda (Rachel Weisz), that he takes for granted, and he dreams of opening an off-track betting parlor. Needing $50,000 to get this dubious enterprise off the ground, he calls Nick at the North Pole. (Don''t ask why Santa Claus would have that kind of cash lying around.) Santa, against the wishes of his sensible wife (Miranda Richardson), tells Fred that if he''ll come help out during the Christmas rush, he''ll give him the loan.

What ensues is a surprisingly careless assortment of dangling plot threads, wasted characters, and ham-fisted attempts to rustle up some Christmas spirit. Dan Fogelman''s screenplay is awash in ineptitude; characters like the Claus boys'' mother and Wanda disappear for most of the film, while Fred and Nick''s dad (Trevor Peacock) is in several scenes yet doesn''t have a single line. I understand he has to be present because the saint thing means he can''t be dead, but seriously, couldn''t you come up with something for the character to do?

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