Sean Hannity’s Christmas movie ‘Jingle Smells’ debuts at worst time

Consider Christmas. No, really—think about it. What comes to mind is probably something like pine trees and wreaths, family and friends, or high-wattage house lights and commercials with cars wrapped in red ribbon. For anyone in the target demo of the film Jingle Smells, however, Christmas is apparently about one thing above all others: sticking it to the libs.

The first sound that audiences hear in Jingle Smells, a film that manages to be even more juvenile and low-effort than its title suggests, is the crisp voice of Sean Hannity. Looking, as ever, like what aftershave smells like, the Fox News star announces from TV that a burly action star in the world of the film has been cruelly “canceled.” Kicking off a yuletide comedy this way makes an unmistakable promise to viewers: This ain’t your granddad’s wimpy Christmas flick. Sure enough, what follows is a thick slab of red meat for battle-hardened veterans of the War on Christmas. But if an anti-cancel culture Christmas movie already sounds like a poor fit, it suits this particular holiday season like a pair of double-XL Santa pants on Timothée Chalamet.

Jingle Smells is a bungled turducken, assembled by too many cooks in the conservative kitchen. Apart from Hannity, who executive produced, it was financed by ACLJ Films—the entertainment arm of oily Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow’s legal shingle for defending silenced Christian voices—and cowritten by Sekulow’s son, Logan. The director is Daniel Lusko, best known for Persecuted, a political thriller about, if you can believe it, the silencing of Christian voices. (The illuminati must have forgotten to silence Lusko as he was making it—a Christmas miracle!) 

It was perhaps inevitable that the director of a film about liberal censoriousness, called Persecuted, would go on to make a project about cancel culture.

The plot of Jingle Smells is so far-fetched, it makes the idea of an obese elder putting gifts or coal in millions of children’s stockings overnight seem perfectly rational. Sheriff Dusty Gutman (John Schneider, whom people of a certain age will remember from The Dukes of Hazzard) springs his fortysomething son, Nick (Ben Davies), out of jail and forces him to work as a garbageman. It is never revealed why Nick ended up in jail, only that it wasn’t his first time and it had something to do with going to the movies—more confusing than if no explanation were provided at all. Meanwhile, the action star, Mason Stone (James Storm), is being canceled over a social media post in which he commits the unforgivable sin of coming out as pro-God, pro-military, and pro-America. After a cowardly toy company CEO (Eric Roberts) caves to the woke mob and recalls a Stone action figure tied to an upcoming film, it falls to humble garbageman Nick to destroy all those defunct toys. Instead, he goes rogue and hands them out to underprivileged children, adopting the trash-fragrant moniker Jingle Smells along the way.

Even for a project with the word “Smells” in the title, this movie stinks. It’s horrendously acted, indifferently directed, and staggeringly unfunny. (The closest thing it has to a joke is that a little person utters the catchphrase, “That makes me jiggle like jelly,” five or six thousand times.) Every conservative grievance, from the climate change “hoax” to the scourge of kale, is awkwardly shoehorned in, often accompanied by outdated references to participation trophies and safe spaces. You know, classic Christmas stuff for the entire family.

The film’s most glaring problem, though, is the fact that its very reason for being—the idea that conservatives are uniquely persecuted for their political and religious beliefs—just exploded.

For years, conservatives have cried “cancel culture” anytime a public figure has been fired for something they said—and sometimes, just when they were tweeted at, really hard. It didn’t matter whether it was a comedian being racist, or a different comedian being transphobic, any pronounced backlash was an egregious overreach. Never mind that those comedians have since gone on to put out popular Netflix specials and win Grammys, or that being canceled is starting to look like a strategic career move for tapping into a new audience.

Of course, Jingle Smells doesn’t have enough grit to give Mason Stone a realistic cause for getting canceled—like a homophobic tweetstorm or resurfaced blackface photos. Instead, he is fired from a movie for literally saying, “May God bless America and may He protect our troops.” Needless to say, no public figure has ever lost their livelihood for something so innocuous, no matter how desperately conservatives pretend otherwise. By presenting this Fox News fantasy of cancel culture, where screeching liberals love to boycott because they hate God and America, the filmmakers forfeit the opportunity to say anything trenchant about how backlashes actually play out in real life.

Mason Stone’s so-called cancellation is meant to mirror what happened to action star Gina Carano, who was fired from Disney’s The Mandalorian over an Instagram post likening the plight of modern conservatives to that of Holocaust victims. The resemblance between the two situations is mild at best. There’s obviously a huge difference between declaring one’s faith in God and minimizing the evils of the Holocaust to inflate one’s own sense of persecution. 

Even still, Stone and Carano might have felt more like comparable free-speech martyrs had the film come out at a different time. Unfortunately, it arrives amid the Israel-Hamas war, which has ushered in a wave of actual persecution not seen in the U.S. since the McCarthy era.

After the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas, a post-9/11-style fervor for unified public opinion erupted in America, transcending the usual red-blue divide. In the nearly two months since, random college students, prominent authors and journalists, and many others have lost job offers, been forced out of jobs, or issued death threats at a dizzying clip, often just for expressing pro-Palestinian views. (As distinct from pro-Hamas views.) In a funhouse inversion of what happened to Carano, actress Melissa Barrera was even booted from her starring role in the Scream franchise after denouncing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza with insufficient tact. Seemingly, no one is safe.

Considering that conservatives have vehemently railed against cancel culture for years, they must surely be furious about so many people getting fired in such quick succession, just for expressing politically unpopular opinions, right?

Not so much, actually. It turns out the anti-cancel culture brigade only defends silenced voices that they either agree with or are at least unbothered by. Palestinian civilians’ advocates do not merit such defense since the official conservative position is that Israel is sacrosanct—for a variety of questionable reasons. Instead, popular conservatives like Ben Shapiro describe those advocates in the least generous terms possible, and cheer on their punishment. Any efforts to explain away this glaring double standard tend to be incomprehensible.

Even the writer of Jingle Smells seemingly has nothing to say about a movie star facing consequences similar to those of the made-up movie star in his film during the week his film came out. Logan Sekulow’s only tweet about reactions to the current war so far praises actor Jon Lovitz, who was so belligerent on Israel’s behalf, Sekulow wants to give him a role in his next project. 

Putting out a ridiculous movie about some invented idea of persecution while a flood of actual persecution sweeps through America only makes that invented version look more ridiculous. Conservative complaints about cancel culture have never been more threadbare than they are right now, and Jingle Smells is their living embodiment. It’s an ugly, sneering mess of a movie made by bitter, aggrieved people who conflate having unpopular opinions with being silenced.

There is no secret cabal of powerful liberals bent on stopping conservatives like the Jingle Smells filmmakers from expressing their views. All that’s standing in their way is good taste.