787. Jingle All The Way (1996)

Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman

Director: Brian Levant

Running Time: 89 mins

Jingle All The Way is an American film about a father who, after forgetting to get his son the must-have toy for Christmas, attempts a last-ditch shopping spree on Christmas Eve to find it for him.

This is not just a really unfunny film, but it’s also painfully stressful to watch. The mad hijinks that happen throughout this film are frustratingly preposterous, the whole story is centred around an experience that everybody absolutely hates, and the fact that there’s no good comedy or any decent performances to make this even moderately enjoyable is the icing on top of the very messy cake that this is.

Let’s start with the centrepiece of this film, which is Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I think that this proves very well that he should stick to what he does best: raging action movies, because this performance is absolutely abysmal. Firstly, his character is totally dislikeable, and he makes no real effort to stop that from coming across, meaning you end up sitting through a whole film having to try and support this guy who you can see is just not that nice at all. Also, and I’m not too sure about this one, Schwarzenegger seems to start off the film with an attempt at an American accent, which then seems to fade away as the movie goes on. Whether that actually happens or not, it really annoyed me throughout.

Anyway, now that that rant is over, I can move onto the next big problem, which is that this film just isn’t funny. It’s a kind of mix of half-hearted attempts at comedy which totally fail, and a real lack of any jokes at all, trying to use the farce and craziness of the story to create laughs. However, none of that works, and you end up sitting through an hour and a half of frustration at this film’s inability to actually make any decent jokes.

Finally, the atmosphere of this film is also horrible. Set around shopping at Christmas Eve, this film tries to do a satire of the obsessive commercialism of Christmas, which fails again, and instead ends up as an incredibly stressful watch. You’re thrown into this terribly unpleasant situation of being in the middle of a shopping rush with someone that you really don’t like, and it’s that that really makes this film both irritating and painful to watch, so that’s why it gets a 5.0 from me.