‘Jingle Jangle’ and Netflix’s furious Christmas movie output
Christmas comes very early on Netflix thanks to a new slate of original holiday-themed content.
Several new movies and TV shows made their debut earlier this month with more on the way in the coming weeks.
Available now:
• “Holidate,” starring Emma Roberts, tackles multiple holidays. It’s about two strangers who pretend to be in a relationship at holiday parties. Long shot bet: They fall in love.
• “Operation Christmas Drop,” about a congressional aide who joins a military operation to drop Christmas gifts on small island countries. People on social media seem to be enjoying this one, but, as a personal preference, I don’t like warm weather-set Christmas movies.
• “Dash & Lily” - a holiday-set TV series about two pen pals in New York City who exchange a journal. Why does this need to be longer than 90 minutes?
Those entries feature a familiar style akin to your usual Hallmark/romantic Christmas TV movies. On the other hand, “Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey,” also available now on Netflix, aims to be a polished replacement for those Christmas-time fantasy musicals that once graced network television years before the rise of streaming services.
A full-on musical (with some songs co-written by John Legend), “Jingle Jangle” follows Victorian-era toymaker and fanciful inventor Jeronicus Jangle (Forest Whitaker in the film’s “main” timeline). After a jilted apprentice steals his invention blueprints (and a creepy, sentient puppet voiced by Ricky Martin), Jeronicus falls into a deep depression. His wife dies and his grown daughter moves away, leaving the once famed toymaker to serve as his village’s cantankerous pawn broker.
When his whipsmart young granddaughter (Madalen Mills) comes to visit for the holiday season, the young inventor begins to respark her Grandpa’s love of creation (it helps that there’s a flying robot in the shop with a cute design that crosses a teddy bear with Wall-E). Unfortunately, that former apprentice (played by Keegan-Michael Key) is also creeping around and looking to steal Jeronicus’ next big idea.
If you can’t already tell, “Jingle Jangle” is saccharine-sweet and overstuffed with plot. The story takes place across three different timelines, including an unnecessary framing device with Phylicia Rashad reading the “Jingle Jangle” storybook to her grandchildren.
Despite some spectacularly colorful costuming, the movie looks a bit “shallow” in its production design. The entire film (minus some questionable CGI) looks to have been filmed on a studio backlot resembling what you’d see on one of those live musical staged productions. That’s totally fine, especially given its throwback story dynamics, but when the camerawork attempts to be more cinematic, those sets begin to look unintentionally artificial.
The cast and the music ultimately power “Jingle Jangle” to relative success. Whitaker, an Oscar winner, even sounds mostly decent in his musical numbers. Key’s comic energy adds an edge to the villain, and Anika Noni Rose adds another vibrant voice to the film in its home stretch as Jeronicus’ grown daughter (though it’s unclear story-wise why she’s absent for so much of the movie). The kid actors are… fine.
Hoping to target every demographic this season, Netflix will continue to add an eclectic mix of Christmas-themed content in the coming days. The schmaltzy romantic follow-up, “The Princess Switch: Switched Again” with Vanessa Hudgens debuted this weekend, followed by the original musical “Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square” on Sunday. Kurt Russell returns as Santa Claus for “The Christmas Chronicles: Part 2” on Wednesday.
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Tyler Wilson has been writing about movies for Inland Northwest publications since 2000. He co-hosts “Old Millennials Remember Movies,” available everywhere you find podcasts. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.
