The Santa Clause 2

Michael Lembeck, 2002
Rotten Tomatoes score: 55%

After two reviews in a row of belated sequels, why break the streak?

Eight years after the original The Santa Clause, which begat a slew of imitators and inaugurated a whole new generation of family Christmas movies, they finally got around to making a sequel. But this time around it is a strictly G-rated affair, and the change of tone is pretty striking—the reindeer are now goofy cartoon characters, Tim Allen's trademark wit has lost its edge, and David Krumholtz as boss elf Bernard acts like he's had a lobotomy. Corniest of all, Scott and the elves are joined in this sequel by a host of other "legendary figures", including Mother Nature, Father Time (curiously played by Peter Boyle, who was Scott Calvin's boss in the first film), and the Tooth Fairy, whose macho pride Scott flatters by renaming him "the Molinator."

It's Bernard, assisted by his henchman Curtis (Spencer Breslin), who breaks the bad news to Scott Calvin. It turns out the Santa Clause that took effect when he first put on the red suit has an additional rider: If Scott isn't married by Christmas Day, he will lose his infinite power. Does this mean that every past Santa Claus has been married? Did Scott's clumsy predecessor leave behind a mourning widow when he fell off that roof? If so, where is she?

Well, let's immediately dismiss all those concerns from our consciousness, because Scott has a second problem on his plate. His son Charlie (played by the same kid from the first movie, but looking totally different) has become a juvenile delinquent. Now Scott must travel to his unidentified home town (Chicago maybe?) to put Charlie back on the straight and narrow and, if possible, arrange a shotgun wedding for himself while he's at it.

Conveniently, the target of Charlie's misbehavior happens to be the beautiful, unattached female principal of his high school (Elizabeth Mitchell). Principal Carol Newman is so stodgy and no-nonsense that she has outlawed all holiday decorations in the school—not out of any commitment to secularism, but just to be a Grinch. Clearly there is room here for her to undergo a total change of character and fall for Scott, but that will have to wait until he has gone through a series of disastrous blind dates (including Molly Shannon working very hard to be obnoxious and succeeding tremendously).

Meanwhile, Scott spends his downtime trying to reconnect with his son. Apparently, Charlie is frustrated by the burden of keeping Scott's true identity a secret; the rest of the world believes that Scott lives and works in Canada. Wait a minute, why is this necessary? I don't understand why Santa Claus has to have a secret identity. He's not Batman. What would be the problem if Charlie's friends knew his father was Santa? And besides, at the end of the first movie the whole town (or at least the whole police force) found out about it.

And what has been happening at the North Pole all this time? Bernard and Curtis have been hard at work filling the movie's run-time by inventing a robotic Santa Claus to stand in for Scott during his absence. I don't know if they're afraid the other elves are fomenting revolution or something, but apparently they are all stupid enough to believe this plastic being is the real Scott. Anyway, do you remember the episode of Futurama where there's a robotic Santa Claus who becomes a tyrant and terrorizes people at Christmas? Well, the same thing happens here, only there are no explosions, and John Goodman is not involved.

Back in the real world, Scott discovers that his magical powers are gradually fading as he spends time among mere mortals, so he has started to look more and more like Tim Allen. Principal Carol notices the difference, but she seems rather unfazed by the fact that Scott has lost fifty pounds overnight. Fortunately, Scott has just enough magic left to liven up a faculty Christmas party by miraculously materializing nostalgic vintage children's toys for the attendees. Slowly, it dawns on Carol that there is something special about Scott, but she can't put her finger on it. (Maybe it was the way he caused it to snow directly above her head, which so few people can do.)

But when Scott tells Carol the truth—that he is Santa Claus and needs to marry her immediately—she has some difficulty accepting it. Unfortunately, that conflict will have to take a back seat, because Curtis has just arrived to tell Scott about the increasingly repressive regime of robot Santa. With no magic left to fly him home, Scott is forced to yank out one of his own teeth (a surprisingly bloodless operation) to summon the Molinator, who obligingly transports him to the North Pole at supersonic speed. Shortly thereafter, Charlie and Carol show up as well, having each sacrificed a tooth to make the trip.

Once the robot Santa is brought to heel, Carol reveals that Charlie has melted her icy heart by uttering some inspirational dialogue. She has now decided to throw caution to the wind, and Mother Nature marries them, Vegas-style, without filling out the proper paperwork. Imagine Carol's surprise when Scott instantaneously transforms back into a 250-pound elderly bearded man before her eyes. (Actually, the credits sequence suggests that Carol herself eventually becomes old thanks to the magic of Christmas, but that will be forgotten by the time part 3 rolls around.)

Not to be left out, Charlie has had a change of heart as well, and he now views his role as Santa's secret-keeper as a blessing rather than a burden. I still object to the whole situation.

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This is a toss-up; I really have no strong feelings. I guess I'll say

Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House

Rod Daniel, 2002
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 24%

Well, here's a low-hanging fruit that deserves more than the one-paragraph treatment I gave it in my Home Alone review in 2012. I called it "despicable," urged readers never to watch it "under any circumstances," and even made sarcastic comments about actors French Stewart and Daniel Stern. That wasn't really fair. Daniel Stern is a reliable character actor, and French Stewart does all he possibly can with the material he has to work with here.

However, I should add that, according to Wikipedia, Daniel Stern refused to appear in this picture, calling it "an insult, total garbage." This quote is unsourced and unverifiable, but what would you have said if they'd asked you to play Marv?

As I mentioned before, this movie was released 10 years after Home Alone 2, but all the characters are played by different, much younger actors. Kevin's enormous family has been reduced to two siblings, Buzz and Megan, who are still bullies. His parents are separated, and his father plans to marry a rich woman named Natalie. Natalie is a decent person who tries her best to be a good stepmother to Kevin, but for some reason we're supposed to view her as a villain.

Fed up with his family as usual, Kevin decides to spend Christmas with dad and Natalie in their capacious mansion. Actually it's more than a mansion; it's a high-tech palace that rivals Smart House. Left with the run of the place during the workday, Kevin enjoys playing with the voice-controlled gadget that controls doors, fireplaces, and showerheads, but the grouchy butler Prescott wishes the little brat would go home. Fortunately, grandmotherly housekeeper Molly is there to look out for him. (In case you're keeping score, no, Kevin is neither at home nor alone.)

But since this is a Home Alone movie, inevitably the Wet Bandits have to make their appearance sooner or later. For some reason, Harry has hung up his crowbar, so instead we get Marv and his loving wife Vera, who scheme to kidnap a crown prince who will be spending Christmas with Natalie. Marv looks and behaves very differently than he did in the old days, and curiously he wears Harry's black stocking cap in every scene. Did the wardrobe department get them mixed up?

You might have thought that the high-tech gadgetry would provide a lot of new opportunities for wacky slapstick sequences involving Marv and Vera, but I guess the writers figured that was too obvious. Instead Kevin thwarts their crimes by bonking them over the head with pots and pans.

Awkwardly, the encounters between Kevin and the Wet Bandits are staggered across a string of clumsy sequences, with the bad guys repeatedly finding new excuses to break into the house and then leave again. First they show up to "get the lay of the land", and Kevin defeats them by turning on all the water in the master bathroom and filling the entire ground floor of the house with six inches of standing water. Unequivocally the best scene in the movie is the one where the bathroom door bursts open and Marv and Vera are carried downstairs on a giant tidal wave that floods the entire house. The first time I saw this, it made me laugh uncontrollably. It's not quite enough to make the movie worth watching, but this is gratuitous property damage straight out of Steve Urkel's playbook, and it is worthy of an encore.

Anyway, when Natalie comes home to eight inches of standing water covering the first floor of her house, she blames Kevin. Kevin insists that the burglars are to blame, but none of the adults believe his story. (And even if they did, I'm not sure this was a reasonable response to a housebreaking.) Meanwhile, Kevin concludes that Prescott must be working for the crooks, since he failed to respond to Kevin's call for help.

The bad guys return during a dinner party, disguised as caterers, hoping to abduct the prince. Unfortunately for them, the prince's flight was delayed, so after another pointless run-in with Kevin, they resolve to break in yet again on Christmas day. When they do, they imprison Kevin and Prescott—who was innocent all along—in the wine cellar. It turns out their inside man was actually Molly, who is Marv's mother. Trapped in the cellar, Kevin uses Prescott's last few minutes of cell phone battery life to call first Buzz and then his mother. When the phone call cuts out, the mother panics and burns rubber to get to Natalie's house. If only there were some simple way to contact professional law enforcement officers during an emergency! Eventually, Kevin and Prescott escape, and a few uninspired pranks later all three Wet Bandits are apprehended.

Once everyone is safe, Kevin's dad reveals that he has decided, purely out of narrative necessity, to leave Natalie and move back in with his family. Even the crown prince, who has finally arrived on the scene, wants to stay with Kevin's family instead of Natalie. Natalie is devastated, but that serves her right for having done absolutely nothing whatsoever to incur anyone's animosity! That'll teach her to be a disfavored love interest!

Kevin brings the entire production to a close by using the voice-control system to cause it to start snowing. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the entire production company laughing at your expense.

Jingle All the Way 2

Alex Zamm, 2014
Rotten Tomatoes score: 30%

I was mildly surprised to discover last year that 1996's Jingle All the Way had suddenly spawned a sequel after eighteen years of well-earned obscurity, and that it starred blue-collar funnyman Daniel Lawrence Whitney (who was born and raised in Nebraska and has never worked for a cable company). I was more surprised, upon finally watching this movie a year after I bought it, to learn that it was produced by WWE Studios, the motion picture division of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Also surprising is the fact that this direct-to-video low-budget sequel actually scored higher on Rotten Tomatoes than the original.

Larry the Cable Guy plays Larry Phillips, a hayseed who may or may not be a cable guy, and who presumably excels at gitting-r-done. Larry lives in a trailer in the woods of North America and enjoys ice fishing with his five-year-old daughter Noel. (The movie was produced in the Vancouver area, known for its damp but mild winters, and seems to take place in equally temperate North Carolina. Apparently Larry and Noel don't mind making the thousand-mile drive to Ontario in a single morning to go ice fishing.)

Noel loves Larry as truly only a naïve child could, but her mother is now married to Victor Baxter, a multi-billionaire box manufacturing mogul. One wonders what Noel's evidently intelligent and attractive mother ever saw in Larry, but if we pause to wonder about that, we may as well also ask why Larry speaks with a cartoon southern drawl while everyone else in his hometown is Canadian. So let's just move on.

Larry resents Victor for his ability to supply Noel with things material, so when he chances upon the tyke's letter to Santa, he sneaks a look to find out if there is anything Noel wants that Victor has not yet provided. It turns out there is: Noel's misspelled letter is hard to decipher, but it appears to say, "I want my family to get Harrison." Larry interprets this cryptic statement as a reference to Harrison the Talking Bear, the most popular children's toy on the market.

Now, in Jingle 1, the sought-after toy was clearly a parody of Power Rangers and other action figures that were the rage in the mid-90s. I'm not sure what they're going for with this talking bear—the closest thing I can remember from real life is Real Talkin' Bubba, but that came out 20 years ago. (If you're old enough to remember Real Talkin' Bubba, I'm sorry for reminding you of it, and if you're not, I dare you to look it up.)

Christmas apparently is still several days away, so Larry is not under the same time pressure as Arnold in the first movie, but every time he comes close to laying his hands on a Harrison Bear, events conspire to thwart him. Eventually, we the audience discover that there really is a conspiracy to stop Larry from buying the doll, and of course Victor is behind it—he has bought every Harrison Bear in town to make sure Larry can't find one. Larry finally puts the pieces together (actually he learns about Victor's scheme from the local news, which seems like a lazy plot device), and sneaks into Victor's warehouse to confront his nemesis.

Faced with scandal now that the town knows he's been hoarding toys, Victor bears his soul to Larry. It turns out that Victor has always envied Larry, the easy-going fun-loving dad, and bought up all the Harrison Bears in a desperate attempt to steal Larry's thunder. This of course comes out of nowhere, but I can't say it's out of character, since Victor was never really given any character traits to begin with. Anyway, Larry and Victor learn to appreciate each other and put aside their differences in record time, after which they placate the townspeople by distributing the stockpiled Harrison Bears to the masses.

On Christmas morning, Larry finally gives Noel her present, and to everyone's astonishment, she is indifferent towards it. It turns out her letter to Santa Claus actually said, "I want my family together as one."

Well, that's just ridiculous.