Post by StevePulaski on Dec 23, 2016 13:12:51 GMT -5
Jack Frost (1998)
Directed by: Troy Miller
Directed by: Troy Miller
Michael Keaton plays a snowman in Jack Frost.
Rating: ★★
NOTE: Rewritten from my original, one-star review, which can still be read here, stevethemovieman.proboards.com/thread/3456/jack-frost-1998
The titular character in Jack Frost is played by Michael Keaton, a father struggling father trying to balance his rock band and a family life. His band, "The Jack Frost Band," is somehow getting their big break based off of a couple of interchangeable Christmas song covers, which means that time with his hockey player son Charlie (Joseph Cross) and wife Gabby (Kelly Preston) have to hold down the fort of their Colorado home while he travels to Aspen with hopes to score a record deal. Unfortunately, he dies in a car accident, and a year later, comes back to life in the form of a snowman Charlie builds outside his house.
A depressed and sour Charlie goes about his life until being graced by his father, reincarnated as a conventional, picturesque three-ball snowman that slides around as if he's a block of ice. The snowman, manufactured by Jim Henson's company much to my surprise, is capable only of spouting pun-filled lines of dialog or saccharine emotional encouragement for a sorrow Charlie, who is trying to handle a group of schoolkids that bully him on top of quitting the hockey team.
Jack Frost is a damning Christmas movie, ostensibly tailor-made and manufactured by gun-for-hire screenwriters (four of them precisely) and producers that think they know what kids want and act like when they really don't and probably don't interact with kids on a regular basis. Films like these are so axiomatic in the way they operate, favoring the emotional depth and obviousness of soap-opera level conviction on top of trite scenes with brazenly unsubtle morals that make the entire experience feel as if it's a sermon for kids to do what they're told and to like it.
The actors, particularly Keaton and Cross, do what they can to liven such a strange premise, barely fit for a Hallmark or Coca-Cola commercial let alone a feature film. The marginal entertainment Jack Frost does indeed sporadically warrant comes during the scenes where things actually happen, like a massive snowball fight where the snowman actually has a role (until he throws so many rapid-fire snowballs at once and his entire area is free of snow, rather than moving two feet in front of himself, he simply proclaims he's out of ammo). If Jack Frost bears any entertainment value at all, it's during the scenes where it actually feels like a fun, free-form kids movie.
Jack Frost really needed a go-for-broke screenplay for this material to even work on an admirable, "they tried" level rather than just a "they tried" level. It needed to amplify the obscurity and almost be self-aware to the lunacy of its own premise. Instead, it meanders and rifts from being a semi-entertaining, serviceable family flick to a wholly lackluster, mawkish affair that does its part in, what I imagine, fully satisfying no one.
Starring: Michael Keaton, Joseph Cross, Kelly Preston, and Mark Addy. Directed by: Troy Miller.