For a child on Christmas morning, there’s no disappointment greater than ripping the paper off a present to find that Mom and Dad skimped on quality control – a wish for the latest MP3 player granted as a brandless kidney bean capable of holding a total of 16 songs, or a SpongeBob plushie labeled “Rectangle Friend” with one eye pointing the wrong way due to substandard Taiwanese assembly. It’s what the kid asked for, technically, and yet an essential quality of authenticity has been lost somewhere along the way. Something just ain’t right.
That’s the prevailing feeling experienced by viewers of Dashing Through the Snow, a family comedy kicked around Disney for six years with Kevin Hart attached until he was swapped out for Lil Rel Howery and the project was remanded to the streaming hinterlands of Disney+. As a series of images played at high speed to simulate motion, this low-effort non-romp does indeed qualify as a movie in the strictest definitional sense, but it’s missing some crucial semblance of realness. One gets the occasional inkling that an important scene has been clipped out and spackled over with dropped-in lines of dialogue recounting action we never saw, but should’ve. Or maybe that director Tim Story needed to do some reshooting, couldn’t get everyone in the cast back together, and stitched together over-the-shoulder shots with body doubles facing away from the camera. However things may have played out, the final product has the distinct yet difficult-to-pinpoint sham essence of a toy made with lead paint.
