The New Holiday Film Critique – Netflix’s Newest Holiday Romantic Comedy Falls Flat.
At the risk of come across as a holiday cynic, one must lament the premature arrival of holiday films before Thanksgiving. While the weather cools, it feels premature to fully indulge in Netflix’s yearly feast of cheap holiday treats.
Like US candy which don’t contain genuine cocoa, the service’s Christmas films are counted on for their brand of badness. They offer predictable elements – familiar actors, low budgets, fake snow, and unbelievable plots. In the worst cases, these movies are unmemorable disasters; at best, they are lighthearted distractions.
The new Netflix film, the newest Christmas concoction, blends into the broad center of unremarkable territory. Helmed by the filmmaker, whose previous romantic comedy was utterly forgettable, this movie goes down like cheap bubbly – fittingly lackluster and context-dependent.
It begins with what looks like an AI-generated ad for supermarket sparkling wine. This ad is actually the pitch of Sydney Price, played by the actress, to her colleagues at a financial firm. Sydney is the stereotypical image of a professional female – overlooked, constantly on her device, and driven to the detriment of her private world. After her superior dispatches her to Paris to finalize an acquisition over the holidays, her sister insists she spend an evening in the city to live for herself.
Naturally, Paris is the ideal location to pull someone from Google Maps, even when Paris is covered in below-grade CGI snow. In an overly quaint bookstore, the lead meet-cutes with Henri Cassell, who distracts her from her device. Following rom-com conventions, Sydney at first rejects this ideal guy for frivolous excuses.
Just as predictable are the movie mechanics that proceed at sudden shifts, mirroring the turning of old sparkling wine in the cellars of the family vineyard. The catch? The love interest is the successor to the estate, reluctant to manage it and resentful toward his father for selling it. In perhaps the film’s most salient contribution to the genre, he is extremely judgmental of corporate buyouts. The conflict? The heroine sincerely believes she’s not stripping the ancestral business for profit, vying against three stereotypical rivals: a stern Frenchwoman, a severe blonde German man, and a delusional gay billionaire.
The twist? Her shady colleague the office rival shows up unannounced. The core? Henri and Sydney gaze longingly at one another in holiday pajamas, across a huge divide in financial perspective.
The upside and downside is that nothing here lingers beyond a short-lived thrill on an unfilled belly. There’s a lack of real absorbent filler – the lead actress, most famous for her part in Friday Night Lights, delivers a merely adequate portrayal, all sweet surfaces and acts of kindness, more maternal than romantic lead. The male star provides exactly the dollop of Gallic appeal with mild self-torture and little else. The tricks are unfunny, the romance is harmless, and the ending is predictable.
Despite its waxing poetic on the luxury of champagne, no one is pretending this is anything other than a mainstream product. The things to hate are also the things to like. One might call a critic’s feelings about the film a minor issue.
- Champagne Problems can be streamed on the platform.
