A Christmas Story Christmas gets a minor award
Peter Billingsley takes over as the Old Man in this sequel to the holiday classic, which strikes a balance between Christmas callbacks and new hijinks
Film Reviews christmas
In the franchise-dominated era of filmmaking, we’ve moved into a phase in which no legacyquel is surprising anymore, so when HBO Max announced that it would release A Christmas Story Christmas, there was as much resigned shrugging as there was genuine excitement. Of course a perennial holiday favorite that plays for 24 straight hours every December would get a decades-later sequel if the original star was game enough to return. Why wouldn’t Warner Bros. Discovery go reaching for those eyeballs, those clicks, those subscribers? At a time when legacy sequels and holiday streaming options are both a matter of expectation, it felt like the ultimate no-brainer.
The question that remained after the announcement is whether or not A Christmas Story Christmas’ play to build on the nostalgic appeal of Bob Clark’s 1983 classic would be successful or not. It is, at the very least, a film built on the very direct involvement of star Peter Billingsley, who produced the sequel and has a story credit, so there’s an air of instant legitimacy that other attempted follow-ups didn’t always have. It’s also, like the original film, a movie rooted in deeply relatable, if more grown-up, holiday themes. The result is something that, while never reaching the ineffable magic of Clark’s film, ends up in solidly entertaining, if slightly disjointed, holiday territory.
More than three decades after the magical Christmas that landed him his trusty Red Ryder BB gun, Ralph Parker (Billingsley) is a married father of two living in Chicago, trying to make his dreams of being a writer into a reality. It doesn’t seem to be going well, and things get a little worse when the first Christmas without Ralph’s beloved Old Man (played by Darren McGavin in archival clips from the original film) looms larger in the Parker household. When he arrives back at his childhood home in Indiana, Ralph learns from his mother (Julie Hagerty) that she expects him to carry on his father’s legacy as the avatar of all things Christmas fun. That means that Ralph, who once spent weeks angling for the perfect present, now has just days to make a perfect holiday experience for his mother, his wife Sandy (Erinn Hayes), his son Mark (River Drosche), and his daughter Julie (Julianna Layne).
“Dad tries to make the perfect Christmas, hilarity ensues” is well-trod holiday movie territory for a reason. It’s something most of us can relate to, whether we’re curating that experience for an entire family or just for ourselves. It’s also a way for screenwriters Nick Schenk and Clay Kaytis (the latter of whom also directed) to mark a transition point in Ralph’s life, one in which his daydreaming and dream-chasing must be, if not put aside, then at least harnessed for more altruistic pursuits. Most of us can remember the moment we started to realize that holidays take actual work, and that our parents were doing that work even when we didn’t notice it, which makes this a very good place to start Ralph’s adulthood adventure. What the film does next is a jumbled mixture of Play-the-Hits callbacks, by-the-numbers mishaps, and some genuinely emotional storytelling.
It all begins, naturally, with centering Billingsley as Ralph once again, and the star of A Christmas Story Christmas returns to the role keenly aware of how important it is to so many people. There’s a strange weight to it when he lapses into the character’s trademark, faraway daydreaming stare, like he knows viewers everywhere are hanging on those looks, and yet Billingsley adapts to Ralph as a parent and husband with ease. There’s a calm confidence to his performance, a comfort that runs through the whole film, so when he reconnects with old pals like Flick (Scott Schwartz) and Schwartz (R.D. Robb) at the local bar, it doesn’t feel artificial. That sense of the genuine extends to his life as a new patriarch trying to make the holidays enjoyable for his family, which means that when the hijinks ensue, we’re naturally rooting for this guy. It’s a solid performance, even if it does take a little while to get used to Billingsley taking over narration duties from the late writer Jean Shepherd.
Even without Shepherd’s voice, though, Schenk and Kaytis do an admirable job of trying to mimic the author’s style, which took Ralphie’s casual observances about the ins and outs of a Midwest childhood and elevated them to the level of grandiose mythology. Some lines ring a little hollow, but when the film is musing over how to keep a busted radiator going in an old Plymouth, or what it means when the phone rings at the bar, it feels like we’re slipping into new corners of the same familiar world.
Unfortunately, that tone doesn’t spread to every part of the film, and there are points when A Christmas Story Christmas advances just a little too far from the laid-back, raconteur style that so informed the original film. Certain elements, like yet another dare between Flick and Schwartz, feel like they happen because the audience expects them, not because we’re watching someone recount their genuine, often bizarre view of Midwest life around the holidays. It’s understandable, but still discordant, in the same way that shots clearly meant to mimic the original in framing and tone can never quite recapture the 35-millimeter magic and texture of Clark’s Christmas lights glowing in the Indiana night.
These moments create a glaring sense of artificiality that A Christmas Story, flaws and all, never had, but they don’t overshadow the sturdy, festive core at the center of A Christmas Story Christmas. This film, like Ralphie’s old BB gun, will never live up to the idea in our minds of what we hope it could be, but that doesn’t stop it from delivering moments of genuine charm and warmth. And after all, as one character points out midway through the film: The perfect Christmas doesn’t exist. You just do what you can, and A Christmas Story Christmas definitely does what it can to make the season just a little brighter.
77 Comments
Okay, let’s pitch some more out-there (or maybe not-so out there?) legacy sequel ideas! My big one is Harold and Kaylynn, in which Bud Cort reprises his signature role in order to teach a depressed, Instagram-obsessed young woman the joys of life via whimsical adventures… and romance.
Big Trouble in Little China 2- Electric Boogaloo.
I would perform a political assassination for this. BTILC is the perfect film imo.
BTILC is the perfect film imo.That’s part of the problem, I think. Part of me really wants a sequel because the first is so ridiculously good, but part of me also knows how difficult it is to catch that lightning in a second bottle.It’s the same thing with Buckaroo Banzai. I’ve wanted Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League ever since I saw it teased at the end of the credits, but the number of sequels that have lived up to their predecessors is vanishingly small, and most of the cases I can think of were earnest, serious productions (The Godfather Part II, The Empire Strikes Back) rather than brilliantly and delicately weird like BB or BTILC.
ET: 2 Extra 2 Terrestrial
The Monster Squad could work.
Hamlet 3.
For a sec I thought you were proposing a sequel to Harold and Kumar.
I can imagine Harold and Kumar as uncle figures to a couple hopelessly straight kids with lousy taste in music. However, after blunts are smoked and Black Sabbath and Rocky Erickson vinyls are played, new bonds are formed and a new, better day dawns.
the one i genuinely want to see is a follow up to the hustler/color of money, with an interesting filmmaker and cruise passing the torch yet again to a new star.i watched both for the first time back to back and really loved it as an experience, would love to see someone like the safdie bros or sean baker take a crack at it.
I love Color of Money, but what new story do you think could be told after the handoff from Newman to Cruise? Perhaps more of a gambling/crime angle? Just passing the torch again seems redundant give how good CoM was.
off the top of my head i think you could do something about the rise of online gambling, videogames and the death of poolhall culture. it was teetering in the color of money but it’s a completely different landscape yet again now.plus just checking in with cruise’s vincent, seeing where he’s at, could be very interesting. frankly both movies are so much about vibes that an actual plot doesn’t really matter as long as they get an interesting filmmaker and an interesting new star. i’d love to see someone like lakeith stanfield play pool for 2 hours with tom cruise.
I was recently thinking how weird it seemed to me that Color of Money picked up 25 years after The Hustler, which seemed like a really long time to make a first sequel. And then another movie Tom Cruise made that year gets a sequel THIRTY FIVE years after the original.
Cruise does nothing halfway.
It’s one of the thing I have to kind of admire about his commitment to making great entertainment I like to see on the big screen. Even if his meatier drama roles are years behind him at this point, I enjoy him trying to kill himself for my money.
The weird thing is, Color of Money is such a great approach to a legacy sequel, yet most modern legacy sequels follow the same basic formula (though most also scrimp on the Tom Cruise role, and not casting someone who can act toe-to-toe with the older actor often leads to a lopsided dynamic).
My Cousin Vinny 2?*looks online*F#@!, there’s already some ground for this to happen…
Santaland Diaries. It’s already a sort of riff on a certain part of A Christmas Story.
Kal Penn’s character has to deal with mortality in the gritty sequel, Harold and Tumor.
I’m still sad we never got that second Ferris Bueller, where Ferris’s life has become mundane and he and Cameron skip work to recapture their youth.It could have been genuinely good.
Ferris Bueller Gets Laid OffA depressing tale of a lifelong slacker who gets canned from the one job he managed to hold for more than a year.
Deux Chiens Andalous
“It’s Still a Wonderful Life”/ “Chinatown 2: Back in Town”/ “Casablanca 2: Casa Bonita”/ “The Little Lebowski”/ “Gone With the Wind….again!”
Risky Business
Those Twelve Men Are Still Pretty Angry.
Twelve Angry Women. Starring Melissa McCarthy!
Jean de Florette: Manon’s Revenge
Is this a paid ad? Despite the B this sounds worse than the 2012 sequel unmentioned in this review (but covered by the AVClub before it’s editorial gutting).
A Christmas Story has had something like five sequels before this one. It’s weird.And a B grade sounds entirely consistent with the author’s review.
I think the difference is that this feels like the first “real” sequel given that the others were pretty much Disney DTV sequel-level cash-grabs.
I don’t disagree! It’s also the first one to actually have Billingsley and other original cast members. (Although where the fuck is Melinda Dillon??)
I was wondering about Dillon myself! It appears that she retired from acting about 15 years ago and I guess she didn’t want to come back. She’s 83, so I couldn’t really blame her. It could also be ageism and they wanted someone younger in the role.
I think it’s only supposed to be 30 years after the original instead of 40, that might be part of it.
No, there were actual theatrically released sequels. My
Summer Story was the first of them, and the only sequel I’ve seen, but another
was actually titled A Christmas Story 2.
Oof. That’s what I get for assuming based on quality.
Pretty sure my mom and I went to see My Summer Story when I was a kid. Or maybe we rented it. It was less memorable than Harriet the Spy, apparently.
Apparently there is a sequel but most of them are just based on other stories from the same book
We really need to leave things alone. I’m gonna punch the next TV executive I meet
In less than 20 years, we’ll be completely out of IP to reboot/relaunch. Scary times ahead.
You say that like they won’t just reboot it all again. Top Gun: Miles Tellers character. Tron: Generations. Ghostbuster: Rebirth. A Christmas Story Christmas Story Christmas
“Hey I just got here, what’s going on?”
I can’t be the only one who finds seeing Billingsley current age kind of unnerving, especially since I’ve watched ACS at least three times a year for the last nearly two decades. I want him to be perpetually nine years old (but not four, and not a girl).
My kid has wanted to watch Elf almost daily for the past couple weeks, so current Peter Billingsley is unnerving for a different reason.
These decades-later sequels do nothing for my nostalgia other than remind me of the inevitable creep of time, and thus end up more depressing than enjoyable
Sounds like a Pink Floyd song.
This was actually Disney’s backup title for Star Wars Episode 7.
watch back to back with The Dirt Bike Kid, now streaming on the ‘Cock.
I mean, we watch ACS about 7 times each Christmas, but older Billingsley is both in Elf AND in Spider-Man: Far From Home.
The “hey remember this” aspect of this one feels more weird than others because the movie is on literally round the clock on Christmas every year. Nobody needs to be reminded of the tongue on the pole.
Especially your mom…
They should’ve gone all-in on a meta bit: Ralphie hanging out with his friends at the bar is an hour-plus, single-take scene where all they do is get sloshed while recapping the original film beat-by-beat over the course of some rote “Remember when?” conversations broken up by “Did your life turn out how you’d hoped?” “No” moments.
My Dinner with Ralphie
Ralph’s beloved Old Man (played by Darren McGavin in archival clips from the original film) It’d be my own personal Christmas Miracle if they slipped in some Darren McGavin clips from “Kolchack: The Night Stalker”. “I’ll never forget the Old Man screaming at the Bumpus’s dogs, or the time he fought a werewolf on a cruise ship.”
The episode with the zombie in the taxi scared the shit outta me.
I may have been raised Jewish, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love a good Christmas ham under the tree! The whole gang’s back (again) for the 2nd 2nd sequel to Bob Clark’s Christmas Classic! The kid sure didn’t grow up pretty, and he isn’t half the Night Before Christmas Stalker that Darren McGavin was, but you’ll still want to stick your tongue to this holiday pole! You don’t need to believe in Christmas to bust open this cracker of a good time – I can’t wait to ask the wife to kiss me under the mezuzah and take her to this one on Christmas Day*! *not playing in theaters.
The whole “taking up the reigns to deliver a perfect Christmas” after the Old Man died is nice, but I don’t seem to remember the Old Man being like a “I’m going to give my family the perfect Christmas”, Clark Griswold-type? He was a nice, albeit authoritative, father figure.
How come he has 2 eyes? Didn’t he shoot one out in the original film?
Medical technology has come a long way since then.
After the soap poisoning claimed his remaining sight, he had an eyeball transplant.
I remain of the belief that Ralphie was actually the local bully in the original and Scut was his victim, only he’s the one telling the story and is the least reliable narrator of all time.
Ralphie Parker likes to beat up poor kids!
We already know he’s a scumbag (most kids are) because he left a friend on the frozen pole and sold another friend out after he swore. But consider the fight. First off, he mentions Scut has yellow eyes, so he’s probably jaundiced. But how does he win the fight? By just straight up beating the shit out of him. Almost as if he’s much, much stronger. And then, how does he react to the thought of his dad finding out? He’s terrified. He knows his dad is going to beat the shit out of him (also common for bullies). Does his dad seem like the type who would be upset that his son stood up for himself in a fight? Absolutely not. He would love that. Because that’s not what this is. This is a kid who has been terrorizing Scut for years, and his dad is fed up with having to explain his son’s actions to irate parents. But Ralphie knows how that would play out, so he took a few creative liberties (He demonstrates this behavior several times in the movie for what that’s worth) to make his serial beatdowns much more sympathetic to the audience. This kid is a menace, and they end up giving him a gun. I bet he wrote this from either prison or a C Suite.
Quick medical correction… jaundice causes the sclera (whites) of the eyes to turn yellow, not the iris.
Fun aside: During my brief working time at the Whisky A Go Go as a bouncer, one of the most memorable band names I saw during a random Amateur Night – The Scut Farkis Affair. I appreciated the joke and they weren’t half bad.
I think your evidence works but I was harassed by a yellowed eye ginger as a kid so it could go either way Ironically that asshole ginger became a good friend years later but when we were young kids he was a huge dick
It only seemed that away until the rest of you had your growth spurts. Oh…. he WAS a huge dick….
Did he go blind from soap poisoning?
Honestly Shepherd’s voice is my least favorite part of the original
Considering how iffy Bob Clark’s filmography was I don’t think
even he could have delivered a worthwhile sequel even had he been
able to reassemble the original cast and crew back in the 80s (see the abysmal
“My Summer Story”). The original really seems to have been the right movie at
the right time where everything fell into place by sheer good luck, in
particular the cast.This might have stood a chance of being a minor
charmer considering how much of the cast is back and the fact I’d be a
real sucker for an early seventies Christmas movie but it just doesn’t feel
right ti me. Recasting Melinda Dillon (who has retired from acting) seems
like a really jarring, awkward decision. It might have made more
sense to just mention both parents have been gone several years
now and definitely not make it a death-driven story
by having the Old Man die just before Christmas-yeesh.If we really have to milk the IP I’d simply recast everyone and
start anew. There’s plenty of Jean Shepherd material to choose from and we
could have gotten a few nice little period movies out of it (with Billingsley as the narrator) This just feels like a missed opportunity.
Want to have the perfect gift for the gerbil on your list? Just save the cardboard tube from a roll of wrapping paper and cut it up into 3 pieces for your favorite exotic pet – that’s hours of gnawing pleasure!
I hope the scene with Ralphie meeting his old pals in the bar involves a bourbon soaked Flick waxing nostalgic for his glory days in the porn industry.
Or that time his father bought him the services of an African American man.
Awwww… no Melinda Dillon. Bummer. So what year range are they setting this in? It’s 40 years after the original was made, which makes him 51 IRL, and should set the movie in 1980-81 based on “stuff” that unofficially dated the original as 1940-41. Do his kids get him a new Members Only jacket?
You’ll never guess where this all-American sequel to a classic was filmed.
“Why…this is no Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss!” – some weirdo, probably.
I saw, A Christmas Story, Christmas on HBO Max. A quick nonspoiler review.First of all, It’s an ok movie. It works in a heartwarming way. Especially if you have a strong relationship with your Dad. It’s no where near as good the original, but that was never going to happen. The narration and music from the original film is back and that helps it feel familiar. Most of the cast returns, except the actress who played the Mom. She retired from acting, but anyway, Ralphie (Ralph Parker) is now family man and a writer who can’t get his stories published and then something happens that makes him have to return to his childhood home. There he decides he wants to make this the best Christmas ever foir his kids. A funny aspect of the film is that Ralphie as an adult is still daydreaming and those segments are kind of funny. The film is slow to start, might even feel boring, but it gets better as it goes along. I think It does a good job of linking itself to the original, A Christmas Story film. Even if the ending feels too contrived. I can see this being shown every Christmas just like the original.