The plot: Eric (Luke Grimes) has arrived to El Camino,
Arizona, in search of his lost father. However, he soon finds himself in a
bizarre hostage situation when he, local policeman Carl Hooker (Vincent D’Onofrio),
mother Kate (Michelle Mylett) and her son, and town drunk Larry (Tim Allen) are
stuck inside of a liquor store. The officers outside, particularly Sheriff
Fuller (Kurtwood Smith) and Deputy Calhoun (Dax Shepard) have no idea what’s
going on, and the situation inside is far from cut-and-dry. It’s going to be a
long Christmas.
Grimes works well as the centre of the story, the guy who is
in the wrong place at the wrong time and ultimately the least malicious of
everyone here. D’Onofrio pulls out more from his character acting bag of tricks
to play an extremely dickish cop who manages to convey a heinous mindset
without it becoming unbearable to watch. If anything, this is worth checking
out for him alone, if only to hear him sing about a redneck marrying a
ballerina. Shepard as the local deputy gets across more of that weird respect
for the police that he showed glimpses of back in CHiPs, and the way that he
seems to be trying the most out of the whole force to make some good out of a
pretty crappy situation makes for a nice presence.
Kurtwood Smith as the
sheriff is absolutely fantastic, balancing out a knowledge of how rock-stupid
the rest of the local police are with a real willingness to call them out on
their idiocy. His experience with delivering burns from That 70’s Show serves
him quite nicely here. Allen turns in his most tolerable performance in a
Christmas film yet, Jessica Alba is thankfully kept to the sidelines for the
most part as the reporter commenting on the action, and Mylett as Kate fits in well with the overall dynamic.
So, we’re clearly dealing with the more subversive kind of
Christmas film, one more focused on human darkness than the sense of goodwill
connected to the holiday. And in that regard, it strikes a decent balance
between the cynical and the sentimental. Through the inclusion of not only the
trigger-happy police but also Allen’s Vietnam veteran, we’re shown how
regardless of what the general ‘feel’ of the holiday is, life goes on
regardless. And what goes on in life is rarely all sweetness and light. In
fact, through that understanding, the film directly brings up how the more
festive tone of the season is held back by how cynical we have become as a
species; the direct reason why more subversive Christmas films exist in the
first place. Characters like Eric, Deputy Calhoun and even Larry try and do
good for goodness’ sake, while others either question why they would bother
doing so or directly appeal only to their own ends. It even gets into the
systems in place that create these attitudes, like how the sheriff brings up
the lack of drug collars Hooker has brought in of late… which leads him to
arresting someone on extremely flimsy evidence.
This is yet another film dealing in police corruption,
except here it digs deeper and ends up tapping into plain old police incompetence. Like with Pork Pie, some
of the darker comedy is derived from how much individual actions begin to
snowball and generally make the situation worse than it would’ve been
otherwise. Setting the majority of the film around one of the single weirdest
hostage situations I’ve yet covered is an odd choice, and as the film goes on,
it starts to abandon the Yuletide commentary for commentary on abuse of power
on the part of Hooker. What I mentioned before about the differences in why
certain characters try and do good as opposed to others? That starts to fall
away after a while, and even though the forced social connections made during
the situation are solid, it starts to feel less and less like the Christmas
setting has a real purpose in the film. On its own, this could’ve been a decent
take on the Southern border style of crime story that Breaking Bad made popular
(the mentions of making crystal meth and the twangy guitar soundtrack add to
that), but when it tries to force in Christmas sentiment, it feels forced.
Part of that is out of how some of the bigger moments of
sentiment are… embarrassing, quite frankly. Like the pregnant news reporter
(Mother Mary allegory, anyone?) or the guy who’s trying to do good who ends up
struck in his side during one of the shootouts (Jesus getting speared) or the
autistic son of Kate who only talks right at the end after being shown
kindness. That last one is honestly surprising because, as soon as it was
brought up in-film that he has autism, I immediately thought that something
disastrous was about to go down. Between the black comedic tone of the film,
which makes itself known rather quickly, and the inclusion of Tim “Political
correctness gone mad” Allen, I thought we were going to end up with him being
made into a joke. Something along the lines of “Is that kid retarded?” or
similar.
Instead, it’s treated with an astounding amount of normalcy, as if
it’s just a condition that millions of people have and isn’t something to be
condescending about. How is it that a Christmas hostage film manages to get
that right, and yet so much of the real world doesn’t? Outside of that, though,
you can tell that Theodore Melfi had a hand in the writing here, as this has
the same difficulties as Hidden Figures as far as aiming for emotional
resonance. It’s too cheesy to land when it needs to, and it’s too dark for the
sentiment to feel within rights to begin with.
All in all, while this film is fairly decent, I can’t say
that I’ll be looking at this as any kind of great example of darker Christmas
stories. The acting is good, the production values are likewise, and the
writing does well enough when it comes to looking at what prevents the
Christmas season from feeling like such, both because of the contemporary
mindset of the people and the circumstantial pressures of the outside world. Of
course, that’s when it bothers to stick to the Christmas side of things; for
the most part, this plays the keystone cop antics so straight that it just
feels like another film getting in on the trend of pointing out the problems
with U.S. policemen. Besides, when it comes to films about hostage situations
set around Christmas, we all know that there’s a film out there that does it
better.
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