If you’ve ever wondered how the character Ralphie came to be narrating his A Christmas Story (1983), A Christmas Story Christmas (2022) sets out to explain that. Although it is a sequel to Bob Clark’s film, A Christmas Story Christmas (by ending with the opening of A Christmas Story) positions itself as a prequel. The two films form a kind of closed circuit. One could presumably watch the two films on an endless loop without any sense of narrative disruption.
A Christmas Story, beloved by many, is a total mess of a movie and not a very pleasant comedy. A Christmas Story Christmas is just as messy but has the originality to be messy in a different way. A Christmas Story Christmas picks up with Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) and much of the old gang thirty-three years after the first film. Although Billy and the other kids look like adults they behave with all the maturity and nuance of a whoopee cushion. Clark Griswold style holiday antics are delivered with the goofball bluntness of Ernest Saves Christmas (1988) but without any of Jim Varney’s charm.
A Christmas Story Christmas seems fully aware that the average consumer’s expectations of Hollywood holiday fare isn’t very high and hinds behind that fact. Humorless, poorly written and performed with a dedication to mediocrity, A Christmas Story Christmas hardly even attempts to approximate its historical milieu. Set in 1973, A Christmas Story Christmas feels about as period accurate as the soundstage that housed That ’70s Show (1998-2006) after the sets had been torn down. Of all A Christmas Story‘s many problems it remained a resonate evocation of a specific historical moment in a way that A Christmas Story Christmas completely ignores.
The fundamental problem with A Christmas Story Christmas is that everyone except two faceless bullies is essentially a good person. Not one character in the whole film is as complex or hypocritical as the cast of characters in Bob Clark’s original. In an effort to be appealing and inoffensive the makers of A Christmas Story Christmas have erased the humanity from Ralphie and company, reducing them to little more than visual “comfort blankets” for the fans of the first film. Paradoxically this sterilization of an intellectual property has had the side effect of stripping A Christmas Story Christmas of its sentimentality.
Essentially A Christmas Story Christmas is a reunion show desperate for approval without anything of its own to offer viewers. As the year draws to a close A Christmas Story Christmas makes its triumphant bid for “worst movie of the year”. I’d recommend a root-canal over A Christmas Story Christmas any day.
