听 User Rating 
You'll need an awful lot of Christmas cheer to forgive Arnold Schwarzenegger for his fourth, and hopefully last, venture into comedy, a turkey that needs stuffing on the most inaccessible shelf of your local video store.
With "Twins", "Junior", and "Kindergarten Cop", Arnie showed he has the comic timing of a dead moose. In "Jingle All The Way", though, he's further hampered by a script that sees Christmas as it really is: a time for rampant commercialism, icky sentiment, and good, old-fashioned greed.
Arnold plays Howard Langston, a workaholic dad who doesn't spend nearly enough time with his whiny, pampered brat (Jake Lloyd). The chance to redeem himself comes when he sets out on Christmas Eve to find his son the most sought-after toy of the season: the all-action, utterly unobtainable "Turbo Man".
Crossing swords with a psychotic postman (burly American comic Sinbad, who's not exactly God's gift to hilarity either), Howard embarks on his impossible quest. When politeness fails him, he resorts to brute force - at one point he duffs up an entire roomful of Santas - but finds himself no closer to his goal.
Though Brian Levant's picture does have its moments - most of them supplied by the sorely missed Phil Hartman as Schwarzenegger's impossibly perfect neighbour - it's difficult to warm to such a deliberately mean-spirited enterprise.
Ironically, Master Lloyd would subsequently inspire a range of toys himself after he took the role of Anakin Skywalker in "Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace".
