I'll Be Home for Christmas

I don't know why I did it to myself. Maybe it's the fact that there aren't a lot of Christmas options on Netflix that don't feature talking animals. Maybe it's my lingering affection for Home Improvement star Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Maybe I just hate myself that much. Well for whatever reason, I recently sat down and watched I'll Be Home for Christmas, the live action Disney "comedy" best known for being the last time anyone has ever seen JTT alive.

Now, I have an unusually high tolerance for Christmas-themed crap, as shown by my love of Jingle All the Way and the fact that I've sat through The Star Wars Holiday Special more than once. But I'll Be Home for Christmas is a horrible, horrible abomination, and I want to round up every copy in existence and have them buried in the desert like the E.T. Atari game.

In the "film", Jonathan Taylor Thomas plays a wisecracking college student who is sort of like the non-thinking man's Parker Lewis. When he fails to deliver on his promise to help a group of jocks ace an exam, he's left in the desert dressed in a Santa suit on the day he's supposed to accompany his girlfriend (Jessica Biel) home for the holidays. What follows is a series of "hilarious" misadventures as JTT hoofs it cross country with a series of painfully unfunny companions such as a carload of flatulant old ladies, a simple-minded thief, a lovestruck goober of a state trooper, his college nemesis (the only character more loathsome than his), and a group of marathon-running Santas. In the end JTT predictably wins back the girl and makes it home for Christmas, even though his smarmy prick of a character hardly deserves it.

What makes this unfunny shitshow even worse are the shoehorned-in sentimental moments meant to make you feel like JTT's character (I want to say "Jack"?) is anything more than a soulless asshole. He makes a detour to a children's hospital, where a young wide-eyed Hispanic stereotype reminds him that Christmas is about family. He returns the money he wins in the Santa marathon after finding out the man he beat was going to use it to buy turkeys for the poor. Finally, he refuses the vintage Porsche his dad (Gary Cole) used as a bribe to get him to come home. These incidents are supposed to show some sort of character development, but I was too busy waiting for Jack to be killed in a grizzly Christmas-related accident to notice any.

The only good thing about this movie is that it is an excellent time capsule of 1998, if you ever needed one. The fashions, the frosted tips, the cultural references, and especially the music. References are made to Fiona Apple, Aaliyah, Smashmouth, and more. At one point, Jessica Biel sings along to Aqua's "Doctor Jones" and her future husband is featured in "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays", NSync's Christmas song which plays during the credits.

But if you're not doing some sort of anthropological study on the year 1998, morbidly curious about the last days of Jonathan Taylor Thomas, or physically confined to a couch in front of a TV playing ABC Family, there is absolutely no reason to ever subject yourself to this film. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to watch Scrooged ten times in a row to get this awful taste out of my mouth.