Jingle All the Way: A Study in Schwarzenegger

Or How Arnold Made an Action Movie for Kids and Jake Lloyd didn't Kill Star Wars

My wife and I watched the Christmas "classic" Jingle All the Way this weekend. It is every bit as fun as I remembered it being, and even more ridiculous. I realized a few things about it that I never had before. So, in no particular order, here they are:

This is a typical Arnold Schwarzenegger action film, only with kids movie elements. This movie is framed like a Mission Impossible film. It has all the typical action moments: he takes on the seemingly-indestructible giant (Santa) in a fistfight, he has an arch-nemesis (a mailman that goes postal), he escapes a package bomb (left by said mailman), and he punches a reindeer (okay, so that one's not typical). The only difference between this and a normal action movie is that the orders come from the protagonist's wife and the mission is to hunt down an elusive toy for his son. This leads directly to my next point:

Jingle All the Way has a terrible message: If you can't be there for your family, then you can make up for everything by buying them something. Arnold's character Howard is a workaholic and often absent father who must hunt down the thing his son wants to prove his love for him. In the end, this isn't what the message is, but the message of the son just being glad to have his father as his hero is lost among all the madness.

There are things that were funny in 1996 that are no longer very funny. For instance, the store employee who was trampled upon by customers when he opened the store doors isn't funny in light of the fact that people have died from injuries caused by this very thing in the last few years. People getting into fisticuffs over products may have seemed far fetched then, but it's just part of  Black Friday now. The threats that Sinbad's postal worker make about having package bombs are not funny in a post-911 world. These threats are taken seriously, and he wouldn't have survived his confrontation with the police. Also, the slapstick scene that occurs when the officer detonates the package bomb accidentally no longer rings true in our modern world.

While watching this, I was also reminded of the tragic loss of Phil Hartman. He was incredibly funny and fit the role he was playing very well. That said, I was shocked at how "adult" his character was in the movie. He was trying to have an affair with every woman in the neighborhood (if not the world), and he wasn't shy about it. I'm not sure how I missed that in the 7th grade, but I was really struck by it this time around. I guess they decided the parents needed something, too?

Jake Lloyd is not the reason that The Phantom Menace and subsequent Star Wars prequels were terrible. Jake actually did a pretty decent job in the role for the age he was at the time. Many now associate him with the failures of the Star Wars prequels, but it wasn't. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong with the prequels (George Lucas), but it is clear that Jake Lloyd was not a terrible child actor. You may want to blame him for being miscast in the role of young Anakin Skywalker, but it was whoever had final say on the casting for that part that should shoulder the blame (George Lucas). And you certainly can't blame Jake for the quality of the scripts (that George Lucas wrote).

In conclusion, I still really enjoyed Jingle All the Way even though it feels different in our day and age. It's thoroughly entertaining (especially for fans of the Governator), and I would recommend it to anyone who just wants to watch a ridiculously fun Christmas movie.