Christmas movies: The Naughty and Nice on Netflix!

Dec 24, 2020 Features / Columnists, News

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By Shikema Dey

Kaieteur News – The holiday season is here again and with abundance of cold, rainy nights, who wouldn’t want a nice, steaming cup of hot

chocolate to warm their spirit as they curl up in front of the TV to partake in a favourite Christmas tradition: Christmas Movie Binge!
But let’s be honest, not all Christmas movies get a A+ rating, so let’s dig into the new Christmas movie offerings from Netflix, letting you know

what’s nice (and naughty).
Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
This star-studded Christmas musical is the most magical of the bunch. Picture The Wiz meets Willy Wonka, with John Legend as a producer. Forest Whitaker stars as a penniless toymaker who has lost his touch and everything else that makes life special: his wife (Sharon Rose) has passed and his daughter (Tony award winner Anika Noni Rose) moved away, estranged. Years earlier he created a unique matador toy that comes to life (voiced by a charmingly wicked Ricky Martin). The naughty toy and the toymaker’s apprentice (Kegan-Michael Key) left with the toymaker’s book of ideas, putting him out of business and making themselves mega-rich.
Things really get going when the toymaker’s granddaughter (bonafide star Madalen Mills) comes to town and she, along with a neighbourhood boy with aspirations of being a great toy inventor, try to save the toymaker from himself. There’s singing, dancing, flamboyance galore, earnest lessons learned, and magic that’s something like science. It’s the kind of movie the phrase “family fun adventure” was invented to describe.
Clocking in at more than two hours, this one could tighten up the runtime a bit, but that just means there are plenty of safe opportunities to refill your hot chocolate or run to the restroom.
I dare you to watch this movie and not feel the holiday spirit.

 

Operation Christmas Drop
In order to protect her boss’ interests, congressional aide Erica (our girl Kat Graham aka Bonnie Bennet from The Vampire Diaries) is sent to a military base in the Pacific over Christmas to find excess spending in order to justify budget cuts. Her biggest target is Operation Christmas Drop, a real-life programme, where service members from the US, Japan, and Australia drop presents (and life-saving supplies) to remote surrounding islands. Hyper-focused Erica knows there’s a possible promotion on the line and she has to work harder than a bunch of dudes named Matt back in DC in order to get it, putting her at odds with the base’s own Santa, Capt. Andrew Jantz (Andrew Ludwid).
In addition to directly engaging with how much harder the Erica’s of the world have to work to get their due, Operation Christmas Drop also highlights the people who live on Guam and the surrounding islands, as the first full-length major studio movie filmed there.
Featuring the favourite romance trope “enemies to lovers,” a tropical Christmas, and some of the real-life people who make the actual Christmas Drop possible, Operation Christmas Drop is an ideal holiday romcom.
It’s still goofy at times and heart-fluttery at others, and of course everything will work out in the end, but it’s better written than most of what’s on TV and casting Kat Graham is always a good choice.

The Princess Switch, Switched Again
It’s not Christmas until you’ve seen Vanessa Hudgens chloroform herself. The sequel to 2018’s The Princess Switch, The Princess Switch, Switched Again, rightly knows that Kevin (Nick Sagar) is a better leading man than the walking robot that is Prince Edward (Sam Palladio). When we last saw the sous chef dad with the six-pack abs who likes sappy Christmas movies and wearing the heck out of ugly Christmas sweaters, he was making out with Lady Margaret. In the two years since then, they’ve split up, the King of Montenaro has passed away, and Margaret’s cousin who was next in line for the throne has abdicated, which means Lady Margaret will be crowned on Christmas. Naturally.
The Princess Switch franchise has found the sweet spot between “painfully bad” and “so bad it’s good.” The latest version adds what the first lacked – a worthy villain. Vanessa Hudgens gleefully vamps around as a Kardashian-esque cousin of Lady Margaret’s who goes after the Montenaran crown. It’s fun to watch Hudgens be bad, and it adds a requisite layer of novelty to the proceedings.
With The Princes Switch, the sequel is even better than the original. The Princess Switch 2 knows exactly what kind of movie it is – fun, silly, romantic, distracting, a mix of both great and terrible fashion, and maybe a little eye roll-inducing. Absolute perfection.

Holidate
If you like a little spice with your sugar, Holidate is the right holiday romcom. Netflix is already the anti-Hallmark in this category, trading judgey and Jesus-y for a sense of humour and soundtracks worth bookmarking on Spotify. And Holidate doubles down on the snark and PG-13-ness of it all.
Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey star as Sloane and Jackson, two singles sick of shrugging off a million questions and setups throughout the holiday season. The cast is rounded out with Frances Fisher (Watchmen, Titanic), Jessica Capshaw from Grey’s Anatomy, SNL’s Alex Moffat, Jake Manley from The Order, and Manish Dayal of Halt and Catch Fire and The Hundred-Foot Journey, proving he deserves to play a romantic lead.
Taking inspiration from Sloane’s perpetually single Aunt Susan (Kristin Chenoweth, who gets away with being so much weirder than anyone else ever could thanks to her many charms), Luke and Sloane go out as platonic dates to a year’s worth of holidays, starting with New Year’s. That also means that while we see two Christmas,’ the movie spends a large chunk of time on the other holidays – so this one doesn’t always feel the most Christmas-y.

El Camino Christmas
This has the same title as 2019’s Breaking Bad movie, and there is at least one meth reference in it. That’s the only similarity.
On Christmas Eve, a troubled man searching for his father pulls out a gun and takes five hostages in a convenience store. It’s absurd, but the cast is good: Jessica Alba, Dax Shepard, Tim Allen and the dad from That 70s Show, who plays exactly the same character but in a police uniform. A few people you don’t want to die, die and others you do want to die, don’t.
If you like your Christmas movies festive and heartwarming, El Camino Christmas, is not for you. But if you’re a grinch, I don’t know, maybe you’ll like it (but also, no promises).

A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding
Our favourite thing about the first ‘A Christmas Prince’ was that it was entirely unoriginal and based on trope after trope after trope. Recognizing this, Netflix’s sequel continued to do the same… with an added, yet not really relevant, side plot about royal funds being embezzled.
I’ve ranked this less bad (and therefore less… good) than the other films for no reason other than the fact that I hated Amber’s wedding dress. I guess agreeing to marry an obscure European prince you’ve known for a matter of weeks doesn’t buy you taste.

Now that you know what to avoid, grab a blanket, get some hot cocoa, curl up and get ready to binge. I hope you enjoyed our list of the best worst Christmas movies to watch now.
‘Tis the season after all.

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