‘Jack Frost’ Melts Down Trying to Be All Things to Most People

Warner Bros. got even with critics for a year’s worth of negative reviews last week when it compelled them to see “Jack Frost” on a Saturday morning. “We’re going to make you see it with children,” a publicist said, with a detectable note of glee.

Fair enough. But if the movie is to be reviewed as a total experience, yours and an auditorium filled with kids, then we must report both reactions. Not much.

There was some enthusiastic laughter throughout the film, which is a fairy tale about a man who dies one Christmas and returns the next as a snowman. But it was the laughter mostly of adults, presumably those who find Michael Keaton endlessly amusing, even as a disembodied voice.

“Jack Frost” is the jackalope of this holiday season. Its overlong first half, which establishes Keaton’s Jack Frost as a blues-rock musician torn between his love for his family and excitement over his suddenly promising career, seems aimed mostly at an older audience.

Aside from a marvelously inventive playground snow fight in the opening moments, this section deals seriously, and effectively, with a man’s sincere struggle to balance his time between his supportive wife (Kelly Preston) and a son (Joseph Cross) who idolizes him, but finding the seduction of success almost irresistible.

The second half of the film is a grade-schooler’s fantasy, the cartoon adventures of a boy and his talking, walking snowman, and a voice-over Keaton interior monologue, apparently written with the purpose of keeping parents’ minds from wandering.

“Talk about separation anxiety,” the snowman says to himself, after his head has rolled a few feet away from his body.

One could, in fact, get genuine separation anxiety at the point where Jack Frost dies, in a car accident while trying to join his family for Christmas in their cabin in the Rockies, and his return as Frosty the Snowman--blobs of snow with attitude. One moment, you have some serious grief issues for wife Gabby and son Charly, the next, Dad is peering through his son’s bedroom window, looking like a happy face on a pumpkin wrapped in white terry-cloth.

Coming to theaters on the heels of “A Bug’s Life” and “Babe: Pig in the City,” “Jack Frost” is something less than a miracle of illusion. The snowman moves like the proverbial man in a gorilla suit. He’s an animatronic puppet, created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic.

There are a couple of action scenes that will please kids. In one, Jack Frost turns his tree branch arms into rotary fans to help his son overwhelm some snow-fight opponents. And in the same sequence, Frosty mounts a snowboard and leads the neighborhood bullies on a merry downhill chase.

But the writers, and director Miller, an MTV veteran making his feature debut, are never able to mesh the film’s contradictory tones. For kids, it doesn’t even make sense on an identification level. The first half ends with a young boy losing his dad; the second half ends him with him losing his dad. And it’s a pretty fine line between flesh and snow.

* MPAA rating: PG for mild language. Times guidelines: Film involves the death of a father and a child’s reaction to it. Be prepared for questions.

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‘Jack Frost’

Michael Keaton: Jack Frost

Kelly Preston: Gaby

Joseph Cross: Charlie

Mark Addy: Mac Arthur

Warner Bros presents an Azoff Entertainment/Canton Co. production. Directed by Troy Miller. Produced by Mark Canton and Irving Azoff. Screenplay by Mark Steve Johnson and Steve Bloom, Jonathan Roberts and Jeff Cesario. Story by Mark Steven Johnson. Executive producers Matthew Baer, Jeff Barry, Richard Goldsmith, Michael Tadross. Director of photography Laszlo Kovacs. Production designed by Mayne Berke. Editor Lawrence Jordan. Music by Trevor Rabin. Running time: 2 hours.

Playing in general release around Southern California