In what feels like a record year for the number of new Christmas movies being unwrapped on the big and mostly small screens, it takes a certain extra sparkle to make one feel worthy of our time. The welcome return of Lindsay Lohan was the mild elevation that Netflix’s otherwise aggressively anonymous Falling for Christmas needed. David Harbour’s theatrically released Violent Night moved past its been-there-seen-that badder Santa set-up with wince-inducing R-rated violence. Apple’s splashy, star-led musical Spirited took the bones of A Christmas Carol and found a new, if annoying, way to add some fresh flesh. In Amazon’s exhaustingly eager Britcom Your Christmas or Mine?, one might struggle to see why our time is even half-demanded here rather than elsewhere, a hackneyed grab-bag of sitcom cliches that ends up feeling more like tired pantomime.
After we follow a distractingly ugly CG snowflake glide through some even uglier CG clouds, we land at Marylebone station and on a young student couple James (Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield, flatter than the film requires) and Hayley (Cora Kirk, fizzier than the film deserves) as they face being away from each other for Christmas. They prepare for their respective train journeys but a sudden burst of romance has them deciding to surprise the other and they end up finding themselves alone with a family they’ve never met before for the big day while keeping their relationship secret. Farce ensues.
It’s a plot that’s just a reindeer whisker away from another tinsel-lined offering this season, the Vince Vaughn-scripted Christmas with the Campbells, which sees a recently dumped woman spend the holiday with her ex’s parents, and echoes other festive films about other families like Four Christmases and Happiest Season. It’s not a genre that exactly demands a great deal of originality to work and there’s definite comedy to still be mined from the forced process of tackling another set of learned traditions at this particular time of year but TV writer Tom Parry struggles, in a competitive season, to decorate his extremely rote script with anything shiny enough to draw our attention. It’s a precariously mounted tree surrounded by old opened gifts.
Each family exists in different, tiring archetypal territory. James has been hiding the fact that he lives in an extravagant but unwelcoming country mansion with a stern father and a put-upon housekeeper (Alex Jennings and Harriet Walter, both too good for this). Hayley’s family is more working class and more boisterous with it, her parents (Angela Griffin and Daniel Mays) barely shutting up to let anyone else get a word in. Characters are cartoonishly sketched, from horny aunt to miserable gran, and so it’s hard to see any of their conflicts or gradually revealed turmoil as anything but entirely synthetic. This would be less of a problem if their antics were at least amusing but Parry’s script is maddeningly unable to provoke even the politest of smirks, not helped by a cast mostly playing everything loud enough for the cheap seats. In an ensemble comedy such as this, where frantic is the chosen mode, it’s too easy for things to veer into grating and too often the film confuses loud for lively. It’s a very small mercy, given what he’s working with, but director Jim O’Hanlon is at least able to competently conjure enough Christmas spirit for the film to visually feel of the season, evocative enough to pierce through for those of us who’ve made the journey from London to the sticks for the holidays.
The downside of streamers going harder than ever for Christmas movies is that we get far too much dross like this but the upside is that, for those desperate for festive viewing, there are so many other options. Leave this one under the tree.
Your Christmas or Mine? is available on Amazon Prime from 2 December
