I wasn’t looking forward to watching ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ (1998) if I am being perfectly honest. Something about watching a Disney film about Christmas which is clearly targeted at anyone except me didn’t appeal to me all that much. I also had heard almost all completely negative things about the film. Why did I pick it then you may ask? After all, no one picks these films for me to review, I pick them all. Well, if I am being honest, I often have more fun writing about the shit films, so I am happy to sit through the crap to have the reward of writing about it. It’s the little things you know. It is a shame then that this film turned out to be demonstrably fine. The film follows Jake (Jonathan Taylor Thomas), a college student in California who is refusing to travel home in New York for Christmas as he holds a resentment against his stepmother. However, when his father (Gary Cole) promises him the Porsche if he is home by 6 pm on Christmas Eve Jake decides to make the journey home. The night before he is meant to travel, he is left stranded in the desert and so must find any means necessary to get home.
As you can probably imagine as this is a Disney joint, the film is technically sound. Well, at least for the most part. It does have a general feel of a Disney Channel film rather than a film made for the big screen, which actually kind of was in the films benefit in this case as I was watching it on a small screen so some of the visual limitations would have been obscure. There are a couple of horrible moments on a technical level. There is one where Jake is running in a Santa 5k where the camera pulled up to show an aerial view of the race and the houses on either side of the race have been computer-generated. My guess would be that the film is completely filmed in California and they wanted snow, so computer-generated it, but it looks so damn ugly. Also, some of the driving scenes don’t look great but they are far more forgivable. In terms of performances, it is again what you would expect from this kind of Disney film. That is to say, not the best, but not bad enough to make it completely unbearable to sit through. There are a couple of moments where I rolled my eyes, but this was more to do with the script than the performances themselves.
It is really strange that I feel like this film is not all that terrible seeing as it is supposedly a comedy and I didn’t laugh once. I did get a giggle at one point, but if I am only giggling once in a comedy film then something has gone horribly wrong. The film's message is also a bit all over the place. Jake is a horrible person, which he is meant to be, and the film is meant to be telling his redemption. All that is fine, except you never really get the feeling that he changes or learns anything throughout. The film tells you that he has by giving him a couple of redemptive scenes where he is a decent person but then they immediately follow this up with him being a douche, so it weakens any kind of moral you are going for with the character. He also only ever gets anywhere in the film through the kindness of others who manipulates into doing what he wants because they are nice people. He never really achieves anything himself through his own actions and it makes him a pretty despicable character overall. So why is this film demonstrably fine? Well, it isn’t boring, and it didn’t annoy me. That is the god’s honest truth. To say I was thoroughly entertained would be a stretch, but I never felt completely uninterested or detached from what was happening. I think my very low expectations may have played a part in that, but I also recognised that this is a film that is not aimed at me and I feel like it would work as a film for its intended audience.
This may be one of the bigger surprises of this Christmas season mostly because I didn’t completely hate it which I fully expected I would. Is it a Christmas masterpiece? God no, and I never want to see it again. But while I was watching I didn’t feel any sort of malice or hatred towards the film, and I was also never bored. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are a child, but I also wouldn’t say you should completely avoid it either. It is one of the more middle ground films I have ever seen, which in some ways makes it also one of the least interesting films I have ever seen as well.
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