After the rousing success of last year’s 12 Days of Cage-mas, Margaux and I decided to pivot and usher in the holiday season by watching a motley list of movies, some good, some bad, all Christmas-y (and no, dipshits, Die Hard is not on the list). Welcome to the first installment of 12 Days of Crap-Mas, Jingle All the Way 2.
Trevor: Watching Jingle All the Way 2 reminded me of when we started Bad Movie Review with Stolen, which was kind of a lot of things – kind of dumb, kind of crazy, but not enough of either to make the solid impression we wanted. JATW2 is barely even a movie. It’s incompetent and dumb, and very, very dull, but not it’s not enough of those things to make it truly crazy or laughably terrible. I mean, it’s a goddamn sequel to Jingle All the Way (more of a remake, in my opinion), starring Larry the Cable Guy, produced by WWE Studios – I don’t know about you, but I wanted this to be way, way worse.
Margaux: I mean, it’s barely even a sequel to Jingle All The Way; the coveted toy of the season doesn’t show up until half way through. It’s more of a Rich Dad-Poor Dad tale that happens to take place around Christmas. Like you just said, the worse offense a “bad movie” could make is not actually be bad enough to laugh at or give you an idea of what they were going for. I wanted JATW2 to go balls to the walls garbage, and I thought WWE having a hand in production would deliver that, like maybe John Cena would show up and body slam Larry the Cable Guy. Alas, the closest we get is Larry getting flung from a mechanical reindeer.
Trevor: Well, Larry’s incredibly bland, undistinguished friend Claude was played by a wrestler named Santino Marella. My god, he was so bad. I thought he won a contest or something.
Margaux: I think we both know the Toy Trader employee, Jeffery, was the only light in this movie.
Trevor: Okay, the actual plot of this is pretty straightforward but it nevertheless raises a lot of questions. For starters, why were Larry and his wife ever married? She’s a career woman and he’s a guy who mostly wears camo? I know Jingle doesn’t give a shit, but it’s so plainly ticking off the boxes it needs to in order to be called a “movie.” And the really maddening thing is, for awhile it even flirts with nuance in the character of Victor, who expresses some genuine concern about his place in Noel’s life, and whether he’ll always be “dad 2.” I was – hear me out – somewhat intrigued by this, until Victor made his cartoonish heel turn (wrestling term!). Surprisingly, Jingle All the Way 2 really dropped the ball with that character arc.
Margaux: Let’s just back up to Larry and Victor’s careers. Victor owns a cardboard box company, which, unless he has a deal with Amazon, I assume is outta business by now. Larry is a part time truck driver, and even though that 100% lines up with his personality, it just sounds pointlessly weird. They set up the rich, Slytherin asshole versus Blake Shelton-light dynamic, and like you mentioned before, makes you wonder how the wife, Trish, ever ended up with either of these dudes. I will give credit to the movie for not making Trish out to be a shrill or gold digger, they made her kind of a non-entity, but at the beginning, she and Larry are fairly good co-parents.
Trevor: I’m glad you brought up Amazon, because the question I kept asking myself during the movie was, “Why doesn’t he just buy the fuckin’ bear on Amazon?” This wasn’t established as a period piece. There was no Amazon in the time of the original film, so I get that, but I think this one just thought if it was never mentioned, we’d all move past it.
Margaux: THIS MOVIE TAKES PLACE IN 2014! I had the same note about Amazon solving 99% of the characters’ problems. This movie would be over in 20 minutes if people used their phones or logged onto the internet.
Trevor: And since you mentioned Larry and Trish being good co-parents, I want to agree with you and add that the weirdest part of this movie was that Larry the Cable Guy was…kind of likable? I mean, the movie bent over backwards to make him a folksy hero, but I gotta admit, in that first scene when he’s pretending his daughter is the alarm clock and he’s looking for the snooze button on her face – that was sort of cute.
Margaux: I’m not going to begrudge Larry being portrayed as a good dad, but he was VERY adamant about wishing ancillary characters a “Merry Christmas” if they ever tried dare to say “Happy Holidays” or any other sort of non-denominational holiday greeting, and then I remembered Larry the Cable Guy is one of those guys who think the war on Christmas is real (and most likely are 45 supporters). Basically any charm that might’ve rubbed off was power washed away.
Trevor: That’s true, and Jeffrey’s “happy holidays” spiel was treated as funny in and of itself – “Isn’t it crazy that people celebrate different religions?? Oh boy!” Like, yeah dude, some people celebrate Kwanzaa, some people celebrate the fuckin’ Solstice. Get over it.
Margaux: And some people just fucking hate Christmas, and that’s okay! Larry, obviously, doesn’t strike me as a person who is very open to other thoughts and opinions, likely has a sticker on his truck that says something to the effect of, “In America, we speak English!”
But I digress, this isn’t about litigating the merits of Larry the Cable Guy’s problematic views, this is about how criminally boring JATW2 is.
Trevor: Boring is definitely the operative word. In a movie like this, which revolves around one-upsmanship between Larry and Victor, there needs to be a constant sense of escalation (this is something that Daddy’s Home, which revolves around a lot of these themes, does pretty well). But this movie just stayed at one level pretty much the entire time, and the hijinx were neither zany nor farcical. It didn’t help that Larry had the deck stacked against him the entire time because of Victor’s wealth. So it just becomes really easy to not pay attention to, with the exception of a few mildly amusing scenes (like Larry’s high school girlfriend thinking that he’s homeless).
Margaux: Honestly, if Victor paid that creepy head of security guy to murder Larry, I’d automatically give this movie 5 stars. Instead, he just makes him buy up this ridiculous A.I. bear (which sounds fucking terrifying and not like a child’s toy, but what do I – a childless woman – know) that’s supposed to be the hottest toy of the season. If that truly is the case, no fucking toy store would let you buy out an entire stock. I can’t even buy more than two Beyonce concerts at time, so it’s hard for me to believe they wouldn’t put a “1 Harrison Bear per customer” rule in place. Especially if their stock keeps getting wiped out by the same person. It’s strange the one-upper-ness never rising above just making sure Larry can’t buy the bear, like that plot point should’ve only taken up 15 minutes of the movie.
Trevor: The movie sets its sights really low. And I thought the same thing about the stores selling their entire stock to one man – the movie even makes this point! (Of course, it does so while Larry berates Jeffrey, which is bad form, Larry, Jeffrey doesn’t dictate store policy.)
Maybe it’s the climate of modern comedy, but in a movie like this you expect to see a lot of little cameos – here’s Jason Mantzoukas as the crazy mailman, or Hannibal Buress as the weirdo cop, something like that. But the cast is so bland (and homogenous, except for reporter Margo Price, who apparently only covers the Harrison Bear beat) that it’s up to Larry to carry the whole goddamn movie, which, try as he might, he can’t really do.
Margaux: I want an entire movie focusing on Margo Price’s investigative journalism where she teams up with Jeffrey from Toy Trader and they solve toy-based crimes because they are the glue that holds this movie together.
Can we agree that Victor’s feeling of being an inadequate step-father could be solved by him having his own fucking kids with Trish? It made me uncomfortable how desperately he didn’t just want to be a positive male figure in Noel’s life, but that he kind of wanted to kill Larry and wear his skin as a suit so he could finally get a #1 Dad mug. Has no one told Victor how shockingly easy it is to have a kid?
Trevor: Seriously, Victor, people do that shit by accident all the time. I know so many stupid people with kids. And Victor’s doing all right for himself! He might be a lot of things, but he doesn’t seem stupid.
So we both knew from the jump that the conflict between Larry and Victor was going to get resolved, but it happens way too quickly. And Victor seem so unsure of Larry’s “crazy” plan to give the toys away – that should have been your plan all along, dipshit! You one-up Larry, give Noel the gift you think she wants, and you give away the must-have item of the season for free in a PR coup. People will be buried in fucking Baxter boxes after that! I take back what I said earlier, Victor is a goddamn dunce.
Margaux: Really is a Christmas miracle that Victor runs a successful box company.
Can we quickly talk about how insane the edits for this movie are? What a variety of wipes! They only they didn’t use was the star wipe, but they had a snowflake one in there! I haven’t seen so many “wipes” since high school broadcast journalism class. And holy crap, the music during the montages! They couldn’t be bothered look past page one on the royalty free music site? The one song during the bear buying montage sounds like it was recorded by a band that usually covers My Chemical Romance songs and thought it’d be a fun challenge to write an original Christmas song.
Trevor: I’m honestly surprised it wasn’t all country. With Larry the Cable Guy as the star of a film from WWE Studios, how wide an audience did they expect to reach?
Margaux: I know! What a missed opportunity.
Trevor: Although we’re both college-educated liberal jerkoffs and we watched it…for the sole purpose of making fun of it, but Amazon still has my $4, goddamnit.
Margaux: So the joke’s on us, we got cucked (or whatever), I think?
Trevor: Typical libtards. So triggered right now.
Margaux: Oh no, someone reboot Friends quick before we have a full on meltdown!
Trevor: Hahaha, okay, we have gone way off the rails. Is there anything else you want to say about Jingle All the Way 2, or do you want to make a wipe transition and get the hell out of here?
Margaux: Only that Larry’s “Tickle Monster” is the poor mans “The Claw” from Liar, Liar.
Trevor: Larry the Cable Guy is the poor man’s a lot of things.
Margaux: Fair. Let’s rate this bitch! Do we have a special scale for 12 Days of Crap-Mas or just our usual?
Trevor: I’m trying to come up with a rating system of 1-12 based on that song but I can’t remember any of it right now. Let’s just do normal star count but we’ll say they’re, uh…candy canes or whatever. No, wait! Lumps of coal! The more coal, the worse the movie was.
Margaux: Not bad enough to enjoy while watching and not good enough to be considered a movie, let alone a sequel to a stupid-fun movie that starred Phil Hartman, but this movie did make me feel something for Larry the Cable Guy which is its greatest offense.
4/5 lumps of coal
About Author
