Jingle All the Way Reviews

Perhaps a die-hard Freudian desperate for a laugh could find humor in this wretched attempt at a holiday heart-warmer. Unfortunately, that leaves the rest of us twisting in the wind. Howard Langston (Arnold Schwarzenegger) may be the mattress king of Minneapolis, but he's a total failure as husband and father. Since he's never home, his frustrated wife (Rita Wilson) is left open to the sexual wiles of the lothario next door (Phil Hartman), and his son (Jake Lloyd) -- a first-class mama's boy in the making -- has pops pegged as a rotten liar. The only way bad dad can possibly regain their affections and his rightful place as man of the house is by procuring that one thing his son desires most: a Turbo Man action figure. Thus begin the labors of the Herculean Howard, who finds that recovering his manhood and acquiring this year's most popular fetish item requires all the virility he can muster. If there were so much as a modicum of intelligence buried within this loud, violent mess, one might mistake it for some kind of ingenious critique of our phallocentric consumer culture. But never fear -- there's little danger of having your unarticulated assumptions about the fundamental precepts of society challenged. Better you should worry that the ad-saturated kiddies will hate you forever if you don't take them to see it.