Rotten Tomatoes score: 20%
I have to confess, I couldn't find this movie to re-watch it, so my recollections are supplemented by plot summaries and reviews I found online. Hopefully that won't impermissibly bias my evaluation. At any rate, remember not to confuse this movie with the horror movie of the same title, released two years earlier to even worse reviews (Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 8%).
Michael Keaton stars as Jack Frost, an improbably named musician who--say it with me now--doesn't spend enough time with his son (Joseph Cross). This son is named Charlie, but don't confuse him with Charlie Calvin from The Santa Clause. This Charlie's father is not going to become Santa; he's going to become a snowman. That's totally different.
Shortly before Christmas, Jack gives his son an old keepsake harmonica that he jokingly claims has the magic power to summon Jack through time and space. Don't confuse this with the snow-globe that Scott Calvin gives his Charlie in The Santa Clause. A snow-globe is totally different from a harmonica.
Jack's band has finally garnered some industry attention (and after hearing their rousing cover of "Frosty the Snowman" during the cold-open, it's no wonder!), but Charlie and Jack's wife Gabby (Kelly Preston) are frustrated with the dearth of free time Jack has left over to spend with them. Busy in the studio, Jack fails to show up to Charlie's hockey game; but the final straw is Jack's last-minute decision to abandon the family vacation on Christmas so he can trek up a dangerous mountain road with his band to attend an audition.
Halfway up the perilous, snow-covered peak, Jack comes to his senses and decides to go back to his family. Unfortunately, a blizzard has set in, and Jack has some sort of weather-related accident. (It's hard to tell exactly what happens, but whatever it is, it kills him.)
We now jump one year into the future, where we see that Charlie has not aged a single day. He even has the same uninspired mid-90s bowl haircut. Don't confuse this with Charlie Calvin's uninspired bowl cut from The Santa Clause, which also stayed exactly the same over the course of a year.
Charlie has apparently spent the past year understandably depressed over the loss of his dad. He has quit the hockey team and become a loner. One day close to Christmas, Charlie and Gabby build a snowman that is supposed to represent the late Jack, but it really just looks like a snowman. Late that night, Charlie finds his father's "magic" harmonica and plays it. Astonishingly, the harmonica really is magic: It causes Jack's disembodied soul to return to this earth and haunt the Living, using the generic snowman as a vessel.
Charlie sees the animate snowman from his bedroom window, but he doubts his senses and goes to sleep. The next morning, he discovers that the snowman really is alive, and it explains to him that it is in fact his dearly departed dad. When Charlie's schoolmates bully him in a snowball fight, Jack uses his incredible snowman powers to pelt them with hundreds of snowballs. Jack and Charlie then board a toboggan and lead the miscreants on a downhill chase. It results in what appear to be rather serious injuries to several of them, but we're not supposed to be concerned.
Reunited with his boy, Jack takes the opportunity to spend some belated quality time together. He even gives Charlie a hockey lesson, which pays off when Charlie re-joins the team. But eventually, the weather turns warmer, and Jack realizes that his snowy avatar will soon be reduced to water. (Couldn't they just put the water in a big bucket and let Jack talk through that? Why is Jack's soul only allowed to possess a snowman? In And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird, TV's Alan Thicke dies and returns to earth as a robot. Would that not work for Jack?)
One of the erstwhile bullies sympathizes with Charlie and Jack's plight--he is quite unfazed by the life-altering realization that Jack has become a snowman--and helps Charlie bring Jack up the mountain, where permafrost will keep him safe forever. Jack telephones home, reveals himself to Gabby, and implores her to drive up the mountain to meet him.
She does so, but at this point, Jack reveals that, inexplicably, he now has to return to the Great Beyond. (Why did they waste their time taking him up the mountain if he's getting out of Dodge anyway?) Rather than melting, the snowman disappears in a cloud of dust (or snow, I guess). Jack momentarily becomes an apparition of his former body, and then vanishes.
In the epilogue, Charlie has readjusted to life without his father, whose memory he now treasures. Gabby has married Jack's former bandmate (Mark Addy from The Full Monty), and they all get on with their lives.
Well, now comes the part where I have to decide whether this is an Underrated Movie. I have to admit it's kind of crappy, but what the heck, it's Christmas:
And the True Meaning of Christmas is:
1. It's wrong for fathers not to spend time with their kids.
Remember, no matter how much of a wild success your Christmas carol cover-band is, your family is more important.
2. Our loved ones will always survive in our fond memories of them.
Only occasionally will they survive in the form of snow.
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