Last Christmas (2019) - Movie Review

Seems like Paul Feig is sticking to his wannabe-European kick. After last year’s quite surprising tribute to French cinema with A Simple Favour, a pretty damn good effort all things considered, Feig’s latest appears to be his attempt at a British rom-com, akin to Love, Actually or Bridget Jones’s Diary. Snagging the co-writer of Bridget Jones’s Baby to both co-write and star in this film is probably part of that attempt, although it’s not as if people need much of an excuse to show off Emma Thompson still being enjoyable after all this time.

Between its Christmas setting, and its main gimmick involving the discography of George Michael (2019 has indeed been the year of the jukebox musical), I can’t say I was really expecting anything from it other than maybe some good laughs and a few feels. I certainly wasn’t expecting a big heap of coal to get dumped in my lap.

The cast do as best they can with the material they’re given, but it still doesn’t manage to excuse how off everyone here feels. Emilia Clarke as Kate, trying once again to set into romantic territory after the rather divisive Me Before You, still comes across as out-of-place in this genre, in no way helped by how thoroughly unlikeable she is throughout. I’m sorry but, even in the framework of knowing that she fucked up and needs to make up for it, the family dinner scene where she ends up outing her own sister is painful to sit through.

Then there’s Henry Golding, who not only showed decent chemistry with Feig back with Simple Favor, but is quickly becoming a go-to romantic lead as a result of being in Crazy Rich Asians. Considering Michelle Yoeh also shows up here, that connection is also likely intentional. However, while he still manages to nail the same kind of charm offensive, and his chemistry with Clarke is admittedly decent, there’s no escaping how much this character is written to be the epitome of wish fulfillment boyfriend. The fact that his presence in the plot is mainly to be the man who ‘fixes’ Kate only makes it worse.

What about the music? Well, while this isn’t necessarily a jukebox musical in the style of Rocketman, Yesterday or even Blinded By The Light, it does lean pretty heavily on the late, great George Michael catalogue for its tunes. Part of its usage merely enters into the realm of lame, like Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go being used to literally wake the main character up, while the bulk of it comes across like egregious disrespect to the artist. Last Christmas is the song that is used most here, except it’s often in the form of remixes that you’d usually find built into speakers on cheap Christmas trinkets. If I never have to hear the chipmunkified version of that song ever again, I can die happy.

And yet, in regards to the treatment of the music, that isn’t even the worst of it. No, that comes in the form of the main plot itself, and it’s a doozy. Apart from the embarrassingly forced Yuletide sentiments, the even more forced caricaturing of Kate’s cynicism and how she needs a man in her life to be happy (good fucking Dude, the new Little Women movie cannot come soon enough), the limp-as-fuck attempts to tie Brexit commentary into the main plot concerning Kate’s Yugoslavian parents, and the tepidness of the main romance… there’s also the ending. And yes, it’s another one of those endings that tries to pull the rug out from under the audience for a surprise emotional shock.

Now, I could easily get into how, upon the film’s initial announcement for release, Twitter basically called the ending right from the off because only hacks would try and be cute by taking the lyrics that literally. Or I could bring up how it is eerily reminiscent of the conclusion to Love Is Now, another rubbish romance flick where the ending took it from unpleasant into proper terri-bad territory. Or I could just lay into how this fake-out, “they were really dead the whole time” ending is so utterly worn-out by this point that it’s pretty much impossible to present with a straight face these days.

No, instead, I’m just going to go with the most pertinent issue with it: It’s cheap. It’s a shallow and quite bullshit conclusion to a film that spends most of its running time going through the motions to slot into the typical holiday-set rom-com framework, as if they wanted any excuse to say that their film isn’t as cut-and-dry as it appears on the surface. Except that very tactic, bottoming out with a cheap shot of an ending, only serves to make the film even plainer than it already is. I’ve covered a few romance flicks with this ending twist on the blog before, and surprise surprise, those ones weren’t very good either.

Even ignoring the ending, this still isn’t all that great of a film. Its characters are stock, the actors try their best but aren’t really able to elevate the material, the story needed to try harder at being emotionally affecting and a bit less at being politically relevant (seriously, the Brexit shit is so thrown-in, it feels like the remnants of an entirely different film), and the treatment of the music, the main selling point of the entire production, makes me weep for the memory of one of pop music’s classic artists. Throw this junk away.