Brian’s Exploratory Christmas Endeavor ’21: London Mitchell’s Christmas

This movie is nearly as low-budget as A Christmas Hero but is less idiosyncratic in its focus, which is the mildest compliment I believe I’ve ever given anything in my entire life.

This isn’t as bad as The Room or anything done by Neil Breen, but it hits very similar notes in its composition: the aforementioned low budget, the earnest efforts of everyone involved, the stock music, the poor pacing and editing, the thin characters, etc. This movie is also not on the The Movie Database, a thing which exists, and isn’t IMDb. That means I cannot add it to my great, long Letterboxd list of Christmas movies. Even A Christmas Hero is available there.

London Mitchell’s Christmas is about a businessman who, I guess, is meant to be quite Scroogelike: successful, but at great cost to his personal relationships. This personality trait is set up, then quickly swapped out with “quiet” as his one and only defining feature. This serious is coupled, about a half-dozen times, with a joke about not wanting any fingers put into his ass at the doctor’s office. Make of that what you will, but it is the only humor in the film.

This is another one of those ostensibly Christmas-themed movies which forgets, rather immediately, that it is meant to be a Christmas movie. This is a regular, exhausting drama with nothing new to add to say or do.

I don’t believe it would be so exhausting if its pacing wasn’t so positively glacial. Conversations run long. Seconds of silence pass between cuts. It’s all just very joyless and agonizingly slow.

If you like so-bad-it’s-good media, you might enjoy the child actors’ performances, and a few of the more effected accents, but it also feels too cruel to try and make those your only sources of pleasure watching this movie. I don’t like kicking a movie or its cast when they’re down, but this one was very bad. Nothing redemptive here, and it hardly feels like a Christmas film.

Actually, wait. I’ve just remembered there is an absolutely stunning scene wherein London Mitchell’s mother just freestyle prays for him to be cured (it causes him to be cured) and it appears to be a completely unscripted in its meandering, repetitive ramble. That part was pretty funny.

This movie is Unwatchable, and even on the GBU Holiday-adjusted Christmas scale, I’m giving it a 2/10.