Snow Day (now on Paramount+) is a musical interpretation of what studio tagline writers would like us to believe is the “classic comedy” from 2000 starring Chevy Chase, Chris Elliott (!), Pam Grier (!!) and Iggy Pop (!!!). How anyone ever thought they could improve on a movie with that cast is beyond me, and now it has songs in it, which would only have been an improvement had Iggy sung at least one of them, but alas. The Godfather of Punk wouldn’t have fit with the remake’s aesthetic, which unfortunately has been shoved through the Nickelodeon blander (not a typo) so we can WHATEVS this thing into oblivion. But just how WHATEVS is it? That’s what I’m here to investigate, my friends.
The Gist: ONE YEAR AGO screams a subtitle. It was a time when about three inches of snow fell, causing school to be canceled, and it was the greatest snow day ever for Hal (Ky Baldwin) and his kid sister Natalie (Michaela Russell). But now it’s December in Syracuse and it’s 65 degrees fahrenheit and climate change will kill us all, probably. Natalie wants a snow day really bad so she can glide right into Christmas break without having to study for all her tests. Hal harbors a megacrush on Claire (Shelby Simmons), but he’s an awkward klutz who ends up in a viral video in which he stumbles and dumps ice cream all over her shirt, and besides, she has a boyfriend who looks like he’s 32, Chuck (Myles Erlick). There is singing and dancing but none of it matters until Hal and Natalie do the snow-day singing and dancing, which they hope will inspire Old Man Winter to take a dump on them.
It works, eventually. Twenty-four of the movie’s 77 minutes go by before the snow day actually happens. F—in’ musicals, man. Always grinding the plot to a halt for a number. And again, it looks like about three inches, barely shovel-worthy, but school is kaputskied, and that’s the important thing, because logic or a convincing visual display of fake snow clearly isn’t. Hal sets out to win Claire’s heart, even though his best pal Lane (Fabi Aguirre) has harbored a crush on him for, like, EVER, and he’s such a charmless drip, he doesn’t notice how smart and funny she is. Meanwhile, Natalie concocts a plan to extend one snow day into two, which involves derailing Snowplowman (Jerry Trainor), a kid-hater with a talking AI-robot crow (yeah sure why not?) who bathes in the soothing moistness of schadenfreude when he clears the roads so all the local brats have to go back to school. CHAOS REIGNS, people. CHAOS REIGNS.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Snow Day Twenty Twenty-Two takes the original movie and slaps a half-assed High School Musical veneer on top.
Performance Worth Watching: Aguirre is a natural in front of the camera, and unlike too many members of this young, cleanly scrubbed cast, she’s got some real charisma.
Memorable Dialogue: The script’s idea of a dad-gum high-larious bit is having a youngster dress like a cop-pirate, prompting his mother to say, “Sorry, Johnny Deputy!”
Read Related Also: Cakes that are the stuff of nightmares, including a creepy replica of Jacinda Ardern
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Since I haven’t seen the original Snow Day, I consulted Roger Ebert, who called it “an uninspired assembly of characters and storylines that interrupt one another until the battle against Snowplowman takes over just when we’re hoping he will disappear from the movie and set free the teenage romance trapped inside it.” That would be a rather charitable assessment of the musical version of Snow Day, which is an uninspired assembly of characters and musical sequences that doesn’t bother to have Chris “Cabin Boy” Elliott reprise the Snowplowman role – perhaps he finally got a life, rimshot! – and features a teenage romance so banal we’d rather see it buried in a snowbank and slowly ground to sediment beneath the ancient, oppressive force of glacial drift.
I will say I appreciated the lightly mischievous spunk of the Natalie character – a true-form chaos agent a la Louise Belcher – and Lane’s sweetheart pragmatism. But the rest of this cast is just big hair and gleaming white teeth spewing lackluster songs and cornball dialogue. It takes WEEKS for Hal to figure out the obviousness in front of him, and Natalie inevitably faces off with Snowplowman in the thoroughfare like Fonda and Bronson. None of this slapdash also-ran cheapo crud is for anyone older than 10 or younger than nine and seven-eighths. Bottom line: Next-level WHATEVS.
Our Call: If a blizzard cancels school, have the kids watch something else. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
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