All the Way

Author’s Note: This post contains spoilers for the film Jingle All the Way.

Jingle All the Way is not a good movie. It was on this basis that I at first dismissed it, from the trailers and commercials that offered little to suggest it would have any redeeming qualities, to my initial throwaway viewing when the movie made its way to cable TV one holiday season. It’s a story that celebrates materialism, with an ultimately hollow lesson about time spent with family mattering more, which is subverted time and again by the film’s solitary focus on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s (inexplicably Austrian and Herculean) workaholic salesman character chasing down a toy for his son’s present, to the closing moment in which we learn he forgot to buy a Christmas gift for his wife, either. Indeed, in what may be the greatest meta-commentary of all on the movie, podcast How Did This Get Made reported that the film was actually legitimately designed to launch the Turbo Man dolls portrayed in the film as actual commodities that holiday season.

For all of these limitations, it was years later that I came to appreciate Jingle All the Way for the film it ultimately is, largely in spite of itself. It’s the ultimate guilty pleasure Christmas movie.

I don’t assign such a title lightly. I take Christmas movies seriously, and while I’ve had to shift my viewing habits since fatherhood, I had up until that point a regimen of about twenty holiday movies I’d watch faithfully each year between Thanksgiving and December 25, ranging from legitimately strong films like It’s a Wonderful Life and The Family Stone to objectively bad sentimental favorites like made for TV like The Twelve Dates of Christmas and The Mistle-Tones, to no fewer than four Muppet Christmas movies.

But while other films offer likable cast members, infectious musical montages, or at least inspiring, if contrived moments of childlike wonder, Jingle All the Way is largely tasteless. It’s with a blush and sideward glance that I laugh out loud when Sinbad calls Turbo Man "Turtle Man," or shoves a parade dancer dressed in gift wrap out of his way and says, "Outta my way, box!" as if he genuinely understood the person obliviously frolicking in front of him to be a Christmas present come to life. In the appropriate pro wrestling parlance, I still mark out at the sight of young Paul Wight (who’d become The Big Show) as a villainous Santa. And as cliché and predictable as the turn is, I silently cheer when Rita Wilson clocks womanizing neighbor Phil Hartman with a thermos after he finally puts the moves on her.

And there’s the matter of Schwarzenegger—a complicated figure in public life, working one of his most overtly commercial, non-artistic roles of a career filled with commercial, non-artistic movies. As alluded to earlier, his accent is never addressed, despite otherwise playing a stereotypical suburban shill who doesn’t make time for his kid, and his physique is only referenced in one throwaway line from Hartman about how he “can’t bench press [his] way out of this [problem].” Despite all of this, I’ll be darned if I don’t ultimately like Schwarzenegger, at least in this character, a little more on each viewing, for little discernible reason, but perhaps rooted in the unabashed bringing together of his utterly pedestrian persona with the totally outrageous sequence of events from the film.

If there’s any time worth suspending disbelief and better judgment, isn’t it Christmas? Rest assured, I’m conscious of buying into the commercial depiction of the holiday more often than any critical thinker should. Nonetheless, I also hold that the degree to which the most commercial, homogenized, saccharine version of this holiday holds up is bringing family together, eating food, exchanging heartfelt gifts not out of obligation but genuine good will, and a particular focus on children. These are all admirable, dare I say good qualities. So it is that I want to assume the best intentions from Schwarzenegger’s character, and Sinbad’s, too, even as they put lives at risk through high wire stunts they are not, in the universe of the film, trained for.

If you’re a legitimate film connoisseur, I doubt I’ll convince you to give Jingle All the Way a chance. But whatever your aesthetic biases or holiday plans, allow me to implore upon you this much. Put pretensions, grudges, and perhaps even your better judgment aside. Enjoy this time of year.

Happy holidays, everyone.