Watched back to back, you stick with the original Last night I watched the original Miracle on 34th Street, then the 1973 made for TV version with Sebastian Cabot. The 1973 version was a mess, with some truly head-shaking script and production decisions that simply made no sense, and I suspect were the result of cost-cutting by the producers. Cabot did fine and David Hartman, too, other than his final courtroom scene, which was atrociously bad, but the rest of the cast were either miscast or never found their roles ... possibly rushing into filming the scenes or maybe just terrible direction.
This film was a MAJOR slide down the slope from even that disaster. No Macy's? The "Cole" Thanksgiving Day Parade? Bad start to begin with. There's no such thing and people know that. Macy's wouldn't participate in this film and I suspect it's because they saw this anathema of a script.
Once again, the Santa is fine and the lawyer is okay, but EVERYONE else is a disaster, from the evil rival store owner to the cold, heartless Mrs. Walker, whose first name was AGAIN changed. Why??
And yes, they changed the lawyer's name, too. Why??
In the original, Maureen O'Hara plays Walker as a sensible "modern woman", but with warmth. Elizabeth Perkins' version of Walker is a post-NOW "modern woman" who is not only cold, but mean spirited. When the lawyer proposes marriage and she tells him, with ice in her voice, that he's "a fool", I was done with this travesty.
The addition of the "evil rival chain" does nothing for this story. In the original, Macy's and Gimbal's are at least friendly rivals, and let's remember this is a SANTA STORY which should be aimed predominantly at kids. The 1973 version lost that thread with vodka in the morning, and this one loses it with a complicated business plot which makes little sense and gives us too many "bad guys".
James Remar and his female sidekick offer nothing to the story. They don't even bring a real sense of foreboding.
Billed as a comedy, in watching the first half of this film, there was NOTHING even remotely close to giving me a smile, much less a laugh.
This is what happens when lesser talents try to leech the brilliance of original writers and creators. They have no chance to improve on the original, and each misstep does nothing but corrupt what made the original a multi-generational success. Shame on Siskel and Ebert for originally approving this disaster. They got it very, very wrong ... which happened more often than you'd think.