Review of Jingle All the Way (1996) by Navin P — 25 Dec 2009

This is an all round poor film: badly written, with action scenes that don't work. It's apparently supposed to be set in the real world, but you have to suspend your disbelief to follow it at all. For instance, one scene has Arnie flying around in a jetpack that he's never used before. By contrast, "The Rocketeer" handles a similar concept much better, since the guy who finds the jetpack is a trained pilot, and even then he crashes the first few times he tries to use it.

In one scene, someone who works in a shop is literally trampled by a crowd of customers as soon as he opens the door, because they're so desperate to buy a plastic toy. This film was made in 1996; in November 2008, a Wal-Mart employee died on "Black Friday" in very similar circumstances. Obviously the filmmakers didn't know about that (since it hadn't happened yet), but it does the make the scene rather uncomfortable to watch now. More generally, the whole film is about people throwing all their morals aside in search of a consumer object with no real value. It sort of works as a satire, but I really don't think that was intentional.

On a positive note, it's interesting to see the guy who voiced Lionel Hutz in the Simpsons.