Merry Little Ex-Mas Review – Cheap Christmas Spirit Season on Netflix Begins with a Shrug | Comedy movies

TThere’s not enough magic to go around in Netflix’s holiday opener A Merry Little Ex-Mas, a film that might have benefited from a release date a little closer to the big day. Perhaps by then, we might have become too preoccupied with the all-consuming excitement of Christmas to overlook its failings, but here in this post-Halloween, pre-Thanksgiving world, no amount of fake snow or eggnog can convince us to partake.

It’s another one of those seasonal films that is mechanically cobbled together by the streamers — the staple 90s/00s blockbuster, a budget that feels like $13, some not-so-funny mistakes, some city/small-town tensions, distinctly Canadian photography, regressive gender roles — and will likely be liked by the same audience that returns every year knowing exactly what to expect. Fortunately, it’s not as terrible as it could be (2023’s Heather Graham/Brandy Sled-wreck film Best. Christmas. Ever! is still about as bad as things can get on Netflix and in life itself) but it’s also not quite as good as it could be (last year’s Christina Milian and Lindsay Lohan vehicles were up to the job on that front).

This time around, we’re led by Alicia Silverstone, an actress who showcased her comedic chops at a young age in Clueless (released 30 years ago last summer) and she helps us get through at least the early stages here. She was paired with 2000s heartthrob Oliver Hudson, who is most familiar with the same fanbase for his role in Dawson’s Creek, where he played her soon-to-be ex-husband. They’re Kate and Everett, two longtime lovers who are now trying to engineer a mature divorce (often referred to as “conscious separation,” an unfunny, dated joke that gets unfunny with repetition) and have decided to give their college-age children their last family Christmas together.

In the impressively ambitious animated opening, we see how Kate abandons her dreams of becoming an architect in Boston when she meets Everett, and follows him to his absurdly named hometown of Winterlite (“It’s like he grew up on Yankee Candle,” she says in one of the film’s most knowing moments) so he can open a local clinic. Instead, she becomes a mother and career woman, putting her dream career aside, but years later, an understandable level of resentment leads her to plot an escape from her marriage and the idyllic, if restrictive, small town. There’s something interesting about the film that acts as a kind of corrective to the turbulent dynamic we’re used to seeing in these films — a career-oriented, one might say fickle, city woman is seduced by a man and a more conventional home life — and shows what can happen when the magic fades and reality sets in.

But any attempt to end their life together with their heads held high crashes into the ground when Everett’s new girlfriend (played by the overly prejudiced Jameela Jamil) comes onto the scene. The script, from one-time Sabrina the Teenage Witch writer and producer Holly Hester (that show’s star Melissa Joan Hart also appears as the subgenre’s standard wine-drinking benefactor) briefly manages to add more texture than a simple case of jealousy being replaced by a younger archetype. Kate, who gave up so much for Everett, now has to watch him give up the things she always asked of him but for a new woman instead. Was it all just to train him to be someone else’s perfect husband?

As expected, the specificity takes a backseat and the physical humor takes over more broadly, and it’s all unfunny not only because of its lack of originality (components include a shirtless hunk of strippers, a Christmas tree fire, and a sleigh accident) but because of the way the mostly adequate cast imposes on the bulky, cartoonish acting that they can’t pull off convincingly. Silverstone’s easy charisma, and her raw chemistry with Hudson, can’t overcome a script that’s not witty or involving enough for us to care about another Netflix family frantically hugging and grinning to show how close they are. The film also suffers from the curse of a disappointing ending that undoes any initial good work regarding Kate’s thwarted career ambitions, leaving one to wish the filmmakers hadn’t even tried to slack off, and briefly pretend that we’re in anything but the same Hallmark universe as the rest of them. Hopefully the production line will give us something worth being vaguely happy about next.