The “manipulative and stupid” Christmas movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Phony to its very bones”
Most viewers have accepted that, when it comes to Christmas movies, certain standards need to be lowered. Otherwise, the deluge of festive dreck that gets pumped out every year and is only relevant for a month or so wouldn’t gain anywhere near as many eyeballs. Since Roger Ebert made his living as a critic, though, he held every feature equally accountable, whether it was festive or not.
There aren’t many Yuletide favourites that can genuinely be called cinema classics, though, with Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life arguably at the very top of the pile. John McTiernan’s Die Hard is right up there, too, but only if you feel the need to wade into the never-ending debate over whether or not it actually counts as a Christmas flick.
As for the rest? Not so much. Jon Favreau’s Elf, Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express, Richard Donner’s Scrooged, Chris Columbus’ Home Alone, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All the Way, and Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa are all beloved by audiences of different generations to varying degrees, but could anyone state a compelling case, and with a straight face, that they’re indisputable motion picture masterpieces?
Solid Christmas films, yes, but not seminal works of filmic art. As mentioned, there’s at least one person who’ll watch anything the subgenre produces, but there was one that Ebert never wanted to lay his eyes upon for a second time, because once was more than enough.
“All I want for Christmas is to never see All I Want for Christmas again,” he wrote in a 0.5-star review. “Here is a calculating holiday fable that is phony to its very bones; artificial, contrived, illogical, manipulative, and stupid. It’s one of those movies that insults your intelligence by assuming you have no memory, no common sense, and no knowledge of how people behave when they are not in the grip of an idiotic screenplay.”
Despite boasting a decent cast, which saw the legendary Lauren Bacall lending support and Leslie Nielsen as Santa Claus, Robert Lieberman’s romantic comedy was slated by critics and shunned by audiences, vindicating Ebert and painting him as less of a Scrooge and more as someone who hates shit films.
The rote story sees two siblings making a Christmas wish that their divorced parents would reunite and fall in love all over again, which they try to manifest by effectively kidnapping her current fiancé and barricading him in an ice cream truck heading from New York City to New Jersey. Does it have a happy ending, giving the kids everything they wanted? If you’ve seen one festive film, you know the answer.
“There was not a moment of the movie I could believe,” Ebert elaborated. “Not a motivation I thought was plausible, not a plot development that wasn’t imposed on us by the requirements of the plot (example: The driver of the ice cream truck has bad hearing, to explain why he can’t hear the bore banging on the window behind his head). Movies like this give ‘cute’ a bad name.”
All I Want for Christmas succeeded in being unstoppably formulaic and the kind of Christmas movie the most uninspired screenwriter could scribble in their sleep, which is why it got nothing in its stocking from Ebert other than a lump of coal.
