Watching 2020's star-studded kids fantasy Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey proves a jarring experience as, after sitting through lots of low to mid-budget tat, this one has clearly had piles of cash chucked at it. This tale of a toymaker trying to get his mojo back has the feel of a real prestige production and had a lot of love from critics when it came out but - whisper it - I find it a bit crap.
It's a BIG film, with lavish production design, costly effects and elaborate song and dance numbers, which is all well and good but this is all fancy window dressing, distracting us from a pretty poor story. Most reviews I've seen lavished praise on it for being a mega-budget Christmas film that finally represented black characters on a large scale. But guess what? Representation, though laudable, does not make this a great film. 2018's Black Panther, for example, wipes the floor with it.
This is an overlong, overstuffed movie with an overblown musical extravaganza every 10-15 minutes. However, under further analysis not a lot really happens and there's very little conflict or action, apart from copious dancing. It takes ages to get going too.
We begin with an old African-American grandmother telling a Christmas Eve bedtime story to her grandkids. They ask for 'The Night Before Christmas' but are told, with a wink, that it's time for a new story, as grandma unleashes a magic, clockwork, CGI-powered book telling the tale of the awkwardly named toymaker Jeronicus Jangle (Forest Whitaker). Jangle has an awesome toy store in a corny, steampunk-inspired unspecified day of yore, where all his cool CGI toys come to life. As a young man (Justin Cornwell), he invented his "greatest creation" - an all-singing, all-dancing arrogant robot matador toy, voiced by latin crooner Ricky Martin. Again, it's one of those hideous toys I cannot imagine any child ever wanting to receive, so I'm not surprised when the thing turns out to be evil, corrupting Jeronicus' young apprentice Gustavson (Miles Barrow), who nicks the toy and all Jangle's blueprints.
Fast forward and Jangle is now grumpy old, washed-up Whitaker, justifiably feeling bitter about how life has treated him, having lost his wife and pushed away his own beloved daughter. I have lots of questions about copyright and patent laws and how Jangle could let Gustavson (now played by Keegan-Michael Key) away with nicking all his ideas and taking his place as the world's greatest toymaker but the film is not interested in going there.
Jangle's child prodigy granddaughter, the similarly madly named Journey Jangle (Madalen Mills), comes to live with him. The kid renews his love of inventing things through copious singing, dancing, smiling and teaching him that "believing" in impossible stuff can bring toys to life. It's science. For an idea of how mawkish all of this is, one of the big musical numbers here is named 'The Square Root of Impossible is Me.'
Journey is irritatingly perfect but also a great role model for young whippersnappers, so I can't grumble too much. It is inspiring to see a pre-teen black girl save the day through science, ingenuity and her wits but, for me, this is all undone by the answers to all the equations being "love" and "believe in yourself" and all that. Director David E. Talbert aims for the profound but this is just reductively lame.
Key at least seems like he's having an amazing time as moustache-twirling baddie Gustavson and gets the best song but, aside from that, his character doesn't do anything apart from steal a robot (offscreen) then later just give it back. So much of the film takes place inside Jangle's shop, with not much happening and I feel like if you take all the songs out, there's not much of a movie left.
Everyone overacts like a 'chim-chiminee' Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and, crucially, there really isn't much of a 'journey' at all. Even the supposedly thrilling effects-fuelled part where our precocious heroine infiltrates the villain's factory is really tame and over too quickly. It all feels kind of phoney and, at over two hours long, I can see a lot of kids nodding off. This should have been so much better.
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