For all the Christmas movies, from made-for-TV "rom-coms" to theatrical releases, there's not telling if it'll become a perennial favorite. HBO Max's original "8-Bit Christmas," which plays like "A Christmas Story" but set in the 80's and trades a BB gun for a Nintendo Entertainment System, has a lot going for it, including some unexpectedly good performances, but occasionally undermines its own homey feel with cheap bodily function (or disfunction) jokes that probably look better in commercials, and can't quite justify the existence of the mild but various political incorrectness. A boy wearing "girls" boots is such a "then" problem that has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with video games.
Now I'll generally laugh at anything as long as somethings funny, but here, it isn't funny. But hey, it was the 80's, a simpler yet probably not any "better" time.
Anyway, the recycled plot... Jake Doyle, played by the plucky Winslow Fegley, wants a Nintendo, badly. Getting one for Christmas means the world to him, and what follows is an hour and a half of him trying and failing to persuade his parents, win one in a wreath-selling contest and trying to buy one during a school trip. Told as a series of flashbacks by adult Jake (Neil Patrick Harris), who's celebrating the season with his own kid who wants her own cellphone, there isn't any substantial parable between his own child wanting and hers except to instigate the whole movie.
But that's OK- the lack of any greater purpose gives the production a small, intimate feeling that I much prefer over last years similarly direct-to-streaming kids movie, the way overstuffed "The Christmas Chronicles 2" on Netflix.
There is also refreshing absence of an arbitrary villain or any real reason for being outside of the obligatory "meaning of Christmas:" this is a movie about a child who wants a gift on December 25th. That's it. Is it an original? Absolutely not, but like "A Christmas Story" it so brazenly copies, it takes its time, showing the boredom kids experience, the exaggeration that only the youth can imagine and the world-ending realities of obligations like chores. There are many scenes of this, but I wanted even more.
The bulk of the action takes place in the indeterminate "late 80's," where Jake's annoying younger sister Annie (Sophia Reid-Gantzert) is on her own mission to get another dated hot-item, a redhead Cabbage Patch Kid. (With freckles!) They form a loose alliance to help each other get what they want under the tree, but they're still brother and sister and they don't always like each other. Their kidding rivalry is without a doubt the best part of the film, making me nostalgic for my own childhood relationship with my siblings, how you can go from hating each other to being friends. At one point, after he loses all hope of getting his NES, she passes the TV remote to him, as a signal that she understood his silly would-be trauma. I did too.
There are some more curious relics of a less complicated era, like when their parents (June Diane Raphael and Steve Zahn) leave the kids unsupervised in the toy store at the mall towns away. They don't add much to the overall product, but they do aid in cementing the whole "back when I was a kid" feeling.
I would be remiss not to mention the sudden tonal shift, when the narrative becomes depressing without warning, which is jarring considering the rest of the picture is so aggressively low-stakes. It feels shoehorned into the plot purely to emphasize the spirit of the holidays, as if the producers realized that "8-Bit Christmas" is ultimately a feature-length advertisement of festive commercialization.
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