This December, we'll be posting about Christmas movies daily, taking a look at the classics and neo-classics, the popular and obscure, as well as some Christmas/Holiday movies that you may not associate with the season, but are appropriate nonetheless. Also we have some of the crappier ones...
JINGLE ALL THE WAY (FAMILY-COMEDY, 1996)Directed by Brian Levant
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman, Rita Wilson, Jake Lloyd, James Belushi
PG for action violence, mild language and some thematic elements.
Naughty or Nice?: Mostly Naughty
Religious or Secular?: Mostly Secular
Cynical or Sentimental?: Very Cynical
Holiday Relations: Christmas is Integral to the Plot
Kicking off our series of Holiday Movies this fine Black Friday-Cyber Monday is JINGLE ALL THE WAY, the would-be satire of seasonal consumerism and greed that is too vapid to prove itself as better than what it would like to be satirizing.
In a strange bit of casting, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Howard Langston, accomplished mattress salesman and dad of the Minnesota suburbs. Howard loves his family, but his organizational skills are at an uncanny extreme to challenge the unlikeliness of his mattress salesman physique, and his inability to keep his promises and his preoccupation with work are putting a strain on his relationship with his bland but hot wife, Liz (Rita Wilson), and his cloying brat Jamie (Jake Llloyd). The night before Christmas Eve though, Howard realizes that his latest slip-up is the mother of all doozies; he still hasn't bought the hottest-selling toy of all time and the greatest desire of Jamie's Christmas wishes: "A Turbo Man action figure with arms and legs that move and the boomerang shooter and his rock 'n' roller jet pack and the realistic voice activator that says five different phrases including, 'It's Turbo Time!'" As Howard haphazardly navigates the crowds of holiday materialism, he recurringly becomes ally and enemy to Myron Larabee (Sinbad), a loudmouthed, dimwitted postman. And as Howard fights (literally) the crowds to get his hand on a Turbo Man doll/action figure, his delightfully devious neighbor, Ted (Phil Hartman, in his last finished film prior to his death in 1998), is putting all the moves on Liz.
JINGLE ALL THE WAY is not a good movie, but what's really remarkable about it is its astonishingly, even hilariously, poor taste (its taste in humor, in fact, is the only hilarity in the movie). Besides the fact that the entire film involves nasty, morally reprehensible people recklessly pursuing material goods with little to no apology, recompense or apparent benevolence, we also get jokes involving pedophilia and postal bombs. Yes, I realize this is pre-9/11, but even still! Sinbad's character gets out of tight spots by wielding random packages that he claims are explosive, and after seeing one fakeout, we see him pull this trick again with some cops, and after the explosion an officer looks up with a blackened face and blown-back hair like something out of a Tex Avery short. Yeesh.
It is not, however, a film without its moments, most of them involving the late, great Phil Hartman's memorable take on the Christmas movie asshole. As Langston's much-too-friendly neighbor, Ted Maltin is the perfect single dad who does everything right for all the wrong reasons. He plans way ahead of the holidays because he's of the mindset that, "You can never do too much to make a child's Christmas magical." That line alone makes him hateable, but when Howard calls home on Christmas Eve, it's Ted that answers the phone while eating the Christmas cookies Mrs. Langston made just before going upstairs to take a shower ("Do you want me to check?" he asks). Did I mention he has a thing for married women? He's so perfect, and so smug, and so evil and with such awareness that it's hard not to root for him in the midst of all these loud and boring characters. Sinbad basically follows the would-be rule that shouting everything makes everything funny, and Schwarzenegger... well, he's Schwarzenegger.
The ending is truly bizarre, with a big budget, special effects-laden, Power Rangers-style action sequence between the two, but the best action scene is easily seeing Schwarzenegger punching Ted's reindeer "Ted" in the face, a la Conan the Barbarian. There's also a bunch of evil Santas, and Schwarzenegger saying lines like "Put that cookie down! Now!" and "I'm not a pervert!" So even though it isn't much of a family Christmas class, JINGLE ALL THE WAY makes a pretty good midnight movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment