Brian’s Exploratory Christmas Endeavor 2016: 4/25
I don’t know why I’m disappointed. I didn’t have expectations going in. Netflix estimated this as a 2 out of 5 for me. They weren’t far off.
Marry Me For Christmas is as slow, trite, predictable and insipid a Christmas movie as anyone could conjure up. I didn’t realize when I started it up that it was a made-for-TV movie, which pretty much explains all this. Even the soundtrack just sort of plods along, jingling here and there to remind you of its presence.
Directed by Roger Melvin, Marry Me For Christmas stars Malinda Williams as Marci, a businesswoman visiting her family for Christmas. She brings her underling from work, a dick named Adam, played by Brad James, who is immediately mistaken for a boyfriend and fiancé-to-be. The faux couple agree to maintain the illusion just to get through Christmas because I guess the family pressure is like, huge. Then another gentleman called Blair, played by Karon Riley, who has a history with Marci, appears and gets jealous. Oh, and all the while, Brad is planning to follow through with the marriage under the assumption that it will lead her to fall out of business and into the family way, so that he can usurp her and climb the ladder to his own success. So we have our evil plotting asshole, and our protective not-love-interest-but-who-knows-we-still-have-90-minutes-left and the stage is set for…movie.
Everything is by the numbers, and the archetypal characters and situations can be seen from space by the naked eye. And that’s really a shame, because the acting is there and there’s plenty of good chemistry between the family members. But everything else about this is just bland and entirely uninspired. It is shot, though well and clearly, with a lot of nice background lighting on a shoestring budget. For example a supposedly meaningful conversation is had along a walk through the neighborhood the are shooting in, and Brad is scared by a dog which we are told is only a chihuahua. We never see it, and that’s kinda the point. Either they didn’t have the money or they didn’t care enough.
This feels like an easy payday for the director and writer Rhonda Baraka.
There’s nothing wrong with re-doing a story that everyone has sat through a hundred times, but you have to be energetic…you have to be confident in what you’re making. This movie doesn’t want to be anything, it doesn’t want its own identity; hell, it barely wants to entertain you. It’s just kinda, there. For an hour and a half. Even the characters don’t seem to care half the time.
Somehow this film earned itself a sequel. Maybe I’ll get to it sooner or later.
★☆☆☆☆
Riding crops for being boring, unenthusiastic, and entirely predictable.
UNWATCHABLE
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