Jack Frost (1997)

(In French, On TV, July 2019) For a generally bad movie, Jack Frost does get going nicely with an opening sequence featuring Michael Keaton as a pretty good Blues musician. Unfortunately, that’s the high note of the film: The next twenty-five minutes merely set up the usual absent-dad, resentful-kid dynamics that we’ve seen in so many other family movies. Then Keaton’s character is killed (!), and replaced in short order by a grotesque snowman. The film becomes increasingly moronic from that point, with early CGI bizarrely combining with substandard practical effects to create one of the most dumbfoundingly repulsive snowmen in movie history. There’s some evidence elsewhere in Jack Frost that the filmmakers have never seen snow in their lives, let alone had any experience with it: many of the opening sequences show appalling ideas about how to build a snowman, and all of the scenes in the front yard of the character’s house obviously have fake snow in a studio set. Those issues could be ignored if the film was actually fun or interesting and it’s neither. Killing off the father in a family comedy at the end of the first act is the kind of inexplicable creative decision that should have stopped the project right there, but Jack Frost keeps going merrily as if it didn’t care. Some of the snowboarding sequences later during the film are dated and overdone in only the way “supercool extreme sports” sequences were back in the late 1990s. An unsatisfying ending puts a merciful bullet in the film’s snowy head, but many people won’t make it this far—my own household’s resident kid’s movie expert decided to stop watching 45 minutes in. I watched the rest later to see if it would get worse, and it did. Too bad—I usually like whatever Michael Keaton is playing. One of the film’s problems is that he’s barely in Jack Frost.