Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Howard Langston, a salesman for a mattress company, is constantly kept busy at his job, disappointing his son. After he misses his son's karate exposition, Howard vows to make it up to him by buying an action figure of his son's favorite television hero for Christmas. Unfortunately for Howard, it is Christmas Eve, and every store is sold out of Turbo Man. Now, Howard must travel all over town and compete with everybody else to find a Turbo Man action figure.
Jingle All the Way is a broadly watchable holiday farce with a satirical edge about consumer Christmas culture, but it rarely rises above its premise. The plot is thin and repetitive — Howard lurching from one failed attempt to the next — with little character depth. Schwarzenegger and Sinbad commit to the slapstick but the performances are serviceable at best. Cinematography is functional studio-family fare with no visual ambition. The concept had satirical potential that goes largely unexplored, making it feel more formulaic than its premise deserved. The ending, however, delivers the silly payoff the film has been building toward — the Turbo Man parade sequence is genuinely fun and brings the farce to an appropriately absurd conclusion.