Jingle All the Way 2

• Directed by Alex Zamm
• December 2, 2014

A father in order to outshine his daughter’s new stepfather takes extreme measures to try and get the hot Christmas toy for her.

Calling this a sequel to the original Jingle All the Way is a bit of a stretch. Nearest I can tell there is absolutely no narrative connection between this film and the first one. They did not even do a halfhearted attempt to recast the Schwarzenegger part. Nor do they make mention of even the toy from the original. This is a film with the same basic idea but is unrelated. It is essentially a direct-to-video reboot.

Jingle All the Way 2 stars Larry the Cable Guy as divorced father Larry Phillips. His performance is basically his stand-up show as a character. Or Larry the Cable Guy as a dad. Take your pick. And that’s when the movie really works. His jokes are the ones you will actually laugh at. The rest of the time the humor is generally that unfunny family friendly stuff done by people that do not know how to do entertaining clean jokes.

Santino Marella plays Larry’s best friend Claude and his acting and jokes fall utterly flat. Not every wrestler can transition to acting even if it is as a supporting player. He either has no acting ability or never really bothered to practice his part before the cameras rolled.

There is a waitress character named Maggie (Rachel Hayward) introduced early on and you begin to think she is going to be a love interest somehow for Larry but her character really goes nowhere. I would have bumped the best friend Claude from the story and promoted Maggie to all those duties in order to get a love story subplot and just make things more interesting. I think you could have generates vastly more humor from Larry and Maggie than Larry and Claude.

Larry’s nemesis is his daughter Noel’s (Kennedi Clements) stepfather-local box magnate Victor Baxter (Brian Stepanek). If you watched any of Stepanek’s work on the Disney Channel, then you know how good he is here. And by “good” I mean really bad and not entertaining at all. That stuff is safer and drier than an episode of Leave It to Beaver.

Jingle All the Way 2 is not as silly or weird as the last one. There is not as much Christmas strangeness and the finale feels rather anti-climactic. This is a comedy about two rivals but by the end they quickly make up and Larry even helps save Victor’s reputation. A family friendly ending in a family friendly film is fine but this came far too easily. It looked like they decided to go cheap. Cut an actor (I am looking at you Santino Marella) to free up funds for something satisfying.

Maybe in the hands of a better director this could have been good, but we got Alex Zamm. Direct to video or a low budget does not necessarily equal bad, but Zamm’s body of work certainly does.

Jingle All the Way 2 is not bad but it is not great Christmas viewing. You will not be disappointed watching this, but you probably will not seek it out again either.