98 min | PG | November 24, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A grown man narrates the story of how, at ten years old, he schemed and lied his way toward a Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988 Chicago. The kids want a video game console. The movie wants to make you cry about your father. Both get what they came for.
Adult Jake Doyle tells his daughter the story of the Christmas he spent chasing the one thing every kid in his suburban Chicago neighborhood wanted. The object of desire is a Nintendo Entertainment System. His father refuses to buy one, his mother bans video games outright, and Jake hatches a series of increasingly desperate schemes to get one anyway. The film borrows its entire architecture from A Christmas Story and does not pretend otherwise. What it is really about is the gap between what a kid thinks he wants and what a parent is quietly giving him instead.
Winslow Fegley plays young Jake with the wide-eyed scheming energy the part requires. He sells the obsession without turning the kid into a brat. Steve Zahn plays John Doyle, the father, as a man whose love expresses itself through woodworking projects nobody asked for and lectures nobody wants. Zahn finds the wounded pride underneath the cheapness. June Diane Raphael plays Kathy Doyle with brisk maternal authority, and Neil Patrick Harris narrates the whole thing as the adult Jake with the practiced warmth of a man who has told this story before.
Michael Dowse directs from Kevin Jakubowski’s adaptation of his own novel. Dowse stages the 1988 period detail with affection that never tips into a museum exhibit. The production design earns its nostalgia through specificity. Trapper Keepers, Garbage Pail Kids, a Nintendo display behind glass at the toy store like a relic in a vault. The film cuts between the framing device and the flashback cleanly, and the narration carries the load without crowding out the scenes it describes.
The film knows exactly what it is and executes the formula with competence. The sentiment lands because the craft underneath it is solid, not because the story surprises anyone. The third-act pivot toward the father is visible from the opening minutes, and the movie spends its energy making you feel it anyway. This is comfort food assembled from familiar ingredients. It does not reach for anything beyond a warm holiday memory, and it delivers that memory without insulting the people watching.