Mainlining Christmas

The third Niko film is the best to date, at least as far as the writing is concerned. The eagles in the second movie basically filled the same role as the wolves in the first , which made it feel somewhat recycled. This time, the primary antagonists are a rival group of reindeer with an axe to grind against Niko's father and Santa's Flying Forces, which makes for a more compelling arc, particularly because the series has always made it clear there are good reasons to hate those guys. It also plays with its genre references in more interesting ways, adding in elements of sports movies into the mix. That's hardly new to animated media about reindeer, but this time it means the story's destination isn't quite as obvious from the start. That's the good news. The bad is the animation feels like a slight step backward. I'm sure it's technically more impressive than the last movie (they had more than a decade of technological advances, after all), but whatever...