For our next Christmas movie of the series, we’re heading over to Disney+ land!
Yes, Disney+, home of Baby Yoda and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. But also! Original Christmas content like Noelle, a film directed by Marc Lawrence, starring Anna Kendrick, Shirley MacLaine, Bill Hader, Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Billy Eichner. If not ground-breaking, it at least seems like with this cast, the movie should be a lot of fun, right? Uh… well.
The premise of this movie is pretty simple. Santa is dead, and his son Nick (Hader) will have to pick up the reins (pun intended). The only problem? Nick doesn’t really feel like he has a knack for the whole Santa Claus thing. His sister Noelle (Kendrick), on the other hand, loves Christmas more than anything in this world and is in Nick’s corner trying to encourage him to be the best Santa he can be.
When that fails, she suggests he takes a little vacation so that he can come back and be in the Christmas spirit in time to do his Santa-ly duties. But Nick ends up loving being a yoga instructor in Phoenix, Arizona so much that he wants to stay. Whatever will Noelle do? I feel like you know. But I won’t spoil it for you all the same.
Let’s rate this sucker.
Romance: 1/10. The romance in this movie is basically non-existent. There’s a HINT of a romance between Noelle and this dude she meets in Phoenix who works as a private detective Jake (Ben-Adir). I don’t really get what the problem is here. He’s single. They kind of have chemistry, despite the fact that Ben-Adir is not a very good actor. Well, maybe he is, but he’s not good in this movie. He’s a private detective. Hot. He’s a good dad. Also hot. What is the problem? Maybe it’s that Kendrick is playing an icon of Christmas. Imagining sex with Noelle would be like imagining sex with Santa Claus himself, I guess? I don’t know. Missed opportunity, I say.
Morality: 8/10. This movie is big on the morality, which is why it’s rating so high here, obviously. But you know? The morals of this story are kind of obnoxious and overdone. First of all, there’s this heavy impression that Christmas is going to be destroyed by Amazon Prime and big bad technology. Okay, maybe, but then why all the love for iPads? This movie is essentially one really long iPad commercial all while renouncing other forms of technology as being soulless. It’s kind of strange, to say the least.
We have a second moral going on here as well: Feminism. Yes. Just feminism. I don’t think the creators of this film thought about the nuances of feminism beyond just the word. This movie has a pretty outdated “GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING BOYS CAN DO!” message. Yes, we know that already. We got other problems. Get with the program. We stan a film with a strong female lead, don’t get me wrong. But come on!
Music: 4/10. I can’t really remember any of the music in this movie, but I’m assuming there were Christmas songs? Wholly unremarkable. Anna Kendrick sings out of her window a few times as well. But like for real. Anna Kendrick can sing. This movie could have done with a charming musical number, right?
Christmas Spirit: 10/10. I got to give it to this movie. There was a lot of Christmas spirit here. A lot of people coming together and caring about what really matters, which I think was iPads. JK it was love and family. But also iPads.
Warmth: 4/10. This movie really tried, but I wasn’t feeling it. I don’t want to make this category the cute fuzzy animal sidekick category, but that’s often how these movies try to bring warmth to the whole production. Here, we have a lot of badly CGI’ed reindeer. The worst one is this little baby reindeer named Snowcone. I think if this movie had gotten a wider release, Snowcone would have been meant to sell a lot of reindeer stuffed animals. Alas, Snowcone’s bad CGI makes him scary AF. Not cute.
There’s also a cute little boy in this movie. Jake’s son Alex, played by Maceo Smedley. There was nothing wrong with Alex or his performance. I just couldn’t help but feel like Noelle was cribbing a bit of this storyline from Elf. Weird elf-like character comes down from the North Pole and weasels his/her way into a family to show them the true meaning of Christmas: family togetherness. Yeah… It was okay in Elf, but it feels pretty soulless here.
So how did this movie rate?
27/50 = 54%/D-. I know percentage-wise, 54% is more like an F+, but F+ just seems like a weird grade to give something, so we’re going with D-. Also, this wasn’t nearly as bad as Let it Snow, which I think needs to be clearly recognized.
I’ll be back in a few days with my next Christmas movie! Fear not!