Up until just a few years ago, writer/director Sean Anders seemingly did all he could to push mainstream edgelord comedy to its breaking point. Hot Tub Time Machine, That’s My Boy, We’re The Millers, Horrible Bosses 2, Dumb And Dumber To, both Daddy’s Home movies; I don’t even outright hate all of these, but they are all grown out of the same cynical view of us as a species. We’re all shit, the world is shit, so just turn it all into an even sicker joke than it already is; not exactly the kind of perspective I can get behind.
But then Instant Family happened. I reviewed it for FilmInk and was genuinely surprised by it because… well, it saw Anders turn over a new leaf. While it still carried some of his tendencies as far as comedic timing, it was also way more wholesome at its core and was made not because he wanted to point out the worst of us, but highlight the good we can do through the foster care system. I’ve mentioned before that I love redemption stories like these, and Anders’ might be one of my favourites in recent memory. It’s why I ultimately decided to give his latest a chance, and it’s also why I really, really enjoyed myself with it.
If Instant Family was the beginning of a redemption arc for the guy, then him deciding to film his own version of the classic Christmas Carol, a story about redemption, is the ideal way to follow it up. And with how he and co-writer John Morris depict the tale is one riddled with postmodern self-reflection and a healthy admission that, yeah, this is far from the first time someone has done a ‘modern’ take on the story. The Ghosts of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani), Present (Will Ferrell), and Yet-To-Come (Tracy Morgan) are now part of a large organisation run by Jacob Marley (Patrick Page), who pick out a Scrooge every year to go through the process. And when Present decides to go after media consultant Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), someone designated as ‘Unredeemable’, the unstoppable force meets the immovable object.
In the process, the film basically interrogates the entire idea behind this kind of overnight, quick-fix morality switch. This might be the ideal way to approach it in a ‘modernised’ sense, considering that very approach of trying to insist someone else to change how they are and their opinions on the world… well, welcome to any given argument on social media. Briggs’ own involvement with social media is Scrooge by way of The Hater, showing him weaponising dissent and ‘cancel culture’ as just another day at the office.
Briggs is basically the Ghost of Sean Anders’ Past: The mentality that there’s no point in trying to make things better, so just find a way to make the waste work to your advantage. And for most of the film, his spectacular stubbornness gives Present a run for his money, effectively making him into the one who has to consider his past actions and what they make him as a person. It got a bit frustrating for me personally to see some of this unfold, if only because I have all-too-vivid memories of being on both sides of this dynamic on Twitter (one of the reasons why I rarely use it nowadays), but what makes it work is that Sean Anders, through it all, believes in people being good.
He wields modern-day cynicisms about morality and whether it is even possible for people to change, but only in the sense that it happens as cleanly as it’s usually depicted in stories like A Christmas Carol. Instead, he exhibits a shining sense of optimism about the world and us, about our capacity to do good and overcome the ills of the past, albeit acknowledging the hard graft required to make it stick. It’s an example of the ‘results over intent’ mentality that I’ve brought up before, and how our actions ultimately mean more and say more than our personal beliefs and ideals. On its own, it makes for impactful material… but considering the interesting parallels it runs with Sean Anders’ body of work up to now, it also hits a sweet spot for me because it feels like Anders is acknowledging that he got visited by three Ghosts at some point himself.
Also, I gotta get into the music for this. After watching this, the frankly lacklustre original songs in Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile make way more sense: Pasek & Paul clearly used all their immediately good ideas on this. The tunes are full of that Yuletide cheer (and the accompanying choreography and framing is sublime), and the lyrics… actually fit the story. Not only that, but they can get outright savage, like with Briggs’ introduction song Bringin’ Back Christmas. Not only does it lay bare the kind of marketing cynicism his character lives by, it’s also a big flaming fuck-you to all the ‘War On Christmas’ bullshit and how much it’s rooted not in actually giving a shit about the Christ in Christmas, but riling up the populace for personal gain.
Where this stands next to the many, many other iterations of this story will vary from person to person, and I’m not even sure if I’d rank this as my favourite ever or anything like that. The run time is a little too long for how much material is here, as good as most of it is, and the singing gets by more on dramatic conviction than impressive vocals. But even then, that same conviction covers up a lot of the cracks, and Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell absolutely sell every note and lyric they’re given. And on top of that, it still works overall as a de/reconstruction of the original story’s core tenet concerning the goodness of humanity, as well as tickling my fancy when it comes to metatextual auteur narratives with how it fits into Sean Anders’ filmography.
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