It's the Grinch! Scatter!

Jingle All the Way

(1996)

(SPOILERS) During the decade between The Terminator and True Lies, Arnie could barely put a foot wrong commercially, and often critically too (what he did with his hands was another matter entirely…) But then it all went pear-shaped. It would be another decade before he began governating, but movie-wise he made dud choice after dud choice; the best you could say of the best of his output during this period is that it was passable. The worst…. Jingle All the Way is generally regarded as one of his stinkers, a nadir that resulted from going back to a well that had little to yield after a deceptively full first bucket or two (Twins and Kindergarten Cop gave way to Last Action Hero and Junior). The novelty value of “comedy” Arnie wore off quickly, and the shrewd businessman who sought out James Cameron, Walter Hill and Paul Verhoeven was now taking notes from the guy who directed Beethoven. But it’s a Christmas movie, right? Arnie has to have a Christmas movie on his CV (aside from the he’d already directed one for TV).

It wasn’t as if Arnie’s nous had entirely deserted him, more that he’d miscalculated, and once you’ve done it once, errors start to accumulate. He’d have been better off going on a Crusade with Verhoeven or being the last man on Earth for Ridley Scott (it was the delayed-then-entirely-off Planet of the Apes for Philip Noyce that led to a Jingle-sized window in Arnie’s schedule). A medium-budgeted Yuletide slog can often make an appreciable profit by coasting on the festive brio of undiscerning patrons, but if you’re going to spend $75m on a comedy (Arnie’s $20m price tag is at least part of the answer to the question of why it was so pricey) you need to be able to guarantee a big hit (it made about $60m in the US, and just over the same again internationally). Producer Chris Columbus had delivered John Hughes’ Home Alone to audiences as director. Levant had directed… The Flintstones. The incredibly named Randy Kornfield hadn’t previously written anything of note, and wouldn’t again (Columbus rewrote the thing; you’d have thought, having been the originator of one of the most jaundiced Crimbo blockbusters, Gremlins, he’d have been a bit sharper).

The gist of the pitch is evident enough; make a festive box office packet soft-selling a cautionary tale in which a wee nipper realises that all he wanted for Christmas was dad, while dad simultaneously gets his priorities sorted… Except that Arnie’s Howard Langston is no Scrooge in the scheme of things, so doesn’t even have an appreciable distance to go to become a better man; he puts work first, and fails to show up to each and every one of his munchkin’s doubtless tedious karate belt graduations (I mean, give him a break, they’ll all be the same after the first couple). It’s the desire to get his son a prized Turbo-Man doll that undoes Howard, leading him to indulge in a barrage of disreputable behaviour – including accidentally setting neighbour Ted’s house on fire while attempting to steal his son’s Turbo-Man doll – and gets rewarded for it with junior’s abiding affection. Do I buy that the moppet would then give away his toy because “What do I want the doll for? I’ve got the real Turbo-Man at home”? Not for a second.

Mighty non-morphin’ Turbo-Man (inspired by free-for-all buyer mayhem as parents trashed stores and each other seeking out Cabbage Patch Kids, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and more recently Buzz Lightyears) is too lamely derivative to be a believable toy; it would have been more impressive if the designers could have come up with something kids really did want, creating a kind of self-reflexive echo tunnel (which is what happened with Buzz, after all). That would have taken thought and care though, and this has sloppy rush job written all over it (why else would you dial up Levant?)

The ongoing duel between Howard and Sinbad’s postal worker Myron Larabee has potential; Arnie and Sinbad are reasonably well matched as sparring partners, and the originally suggested Joe Pesci might have been a little too evocative of Columbus’ earlier Christmas treat(s). There’s scope for some solid slapstick in their ongoing scrum, reminiscent of Pesci and Stern repeatedly coming a cropper at Macauley Culkin’s psychotic hands in Home Alone. Sinbad’s dyspeptic attitude also makes for a fun contrast to Arnie not quite knowing where he is (he isn’t the straight man, he isn’t the hero, and when he’s doing anything else, he resembles a inert block of buff cardboard); “We are being set up by right and powerful toy cartels” warns Myron early in the proceedings. He also gives good pratfalls. Blasting out “It’s the most wonderful time of the year” over a consumer feeding frenzy montage isn’t subtle, but it does raise a smile.

Put Arnie on a back foot in a scene, though, and the incongruity does still tend to pay off. His seething jealousy of Ted, Phil Hartman’s too-good-to-be-true lecherous neighbour (who suddenly became extra helpful and a great dad when his wife left him; now all the wives think he’s the business) is amusing, and Hartman revels in Ted’s shameless inveigling (“He’s in my house, putting up my star!” exclaims Howard). Another scene finds Arnie on an ice rink fending off outraged parents – “I’m not a pervert. I was just looking for my Turbo-Man doll” he protests. Not a scene you’d expect to get okayed in the current cultural climate, and probably not the best defence against levelled charges, any more than Sinbad claiming he’s carrying mail bombs (ah, more innocent times).

John Belushi, Arnie’s old Red Heat sparring partner, shows up as a pre-Bad Santa bad Santa (complete with opprobrious elf). There’s an amusing daft sequence in which Howard sets to on a warehouse full of Santas, complete with flying Santa dwarf, after Belushi has palmed him off with a Mexican Turbo-Man that promptly falls apart. At another juncture, Arnie punches out a reindeer (a homage to Conan the Destroyer, although it sounds weird suggesting anyone might want to homage Conan the Destroyer).

The action climax at the Christmas parade, in which Howard dresses as Turbo-Man (and, inevitably, Myron as archenemy Demento), is as slipshod and uncoordinated as you’d expect from Levant, and replete with indigestibly stodgy, sentimental guff (“Thanks, Turbo-Man, I knew you’d save me”). It bears noting that, while Rita Wilson (Mrs Tom Hanks) is note-perfect as Howard’s wife, munchkin Jake Lloyd is about as effective here as he would be in The Phantom Menace a few years later. That’s what comes from having the Austrian Oak offering notes during your formative acting experience.

Jingle All the Way isn’t very good, but mercifully neither is it a slog to get through, in contrast to certain Arnie pictures during this period (step forward Batman & Robin). You can fully see why Tim Allen – whose Christmas movie whorishness was only surpassed by Vince Vaughn during the following decade – was up for the lead part, and the picture’s cake-and-eat-it shamelessness, and general “that’ll do” quality (like everything Levant directs, it could have been made for TV) mean you’re under no illusions about it being exactly what it is.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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