Christmas Karma (2025)

While there are good and bad things in Christmas Karma, one of my favourite things wasn't really to do with the film itself. I was most amused the the potential reaction to the film by red-faced "patriots" who might find their noses put out of joint as they started to moan about "bloody foreigners, coming over here, and repurposing our classic Dickensian Christmas tales." Considering the constant attempts to get everyone worked up over some (non-existent) war on Christmas, and considering the recent extra toxicity surrounding discussions on immigration, asylum seekers, and national identity, Christmas Karma feels almost deliciously well-timed.

You know the story, which means I can just go through the main players. Kunal Nayyar plays Eshaan Sood (uttering "Bakwaas!" as the Hindi/Urdu equivalent of "Bah, humbug!"). Leo Suter and Pixie Lott are Bob and Mary Cratchit, respectively, complete with a set of children that includes a Tiny Tim (Freddie Marshall-Ellis). Danny Dyer is a black cab driver who helps to bookend things, Eva Longoria is the Ghost Of Christmas Past, Billy Porter is the Ghost Of Christmas Present, and, ummmm, Boy George is the Karma Chamel . . . I mean . . . the Ghost Of Christmas Future. Hugh Bonneville is hard to recognise as Marley, Allan Corduner is Mr. Fezzywig, and Charithra Chandran is a lost love named Bea Fernandez.

Adapted from the source material and directed by Gurinder Chadha, Christmas Karma doesn't get off to the best start. It feels a bit clumsy, and may well make others cringe as I did. The songs aren't great, which is an extra stumbling block for a musical, despite the whole thing being worked on by Gary Barlow, Shaznay Lewis (also onscreen very briefly), and Nitin Sawhney, and there are some major weak spots in the casting of the supporting players. Things pick up once Sood is whisked away by the Ghost Of Christmas Past though, and the use of the familiar tale to explore the immigrant experience, as well as wealth disparity, allows for everything to feel like a very worthwhile wander back through this well-trodden path. Then it sadly gets stuck again when Boy George appears and just looks as if he's loitering around until enough people notice that he's sulking.

It's always clear to see what Chadha is aiming for, which makes it even more of a shame when a few of the sequences just don't work, either due to the cast, the staging of a musical number, or just the familiarity of certain moments working against it. While I don't remember any of the tunes right now, there is at least one decent number in the beginning, middle, and end of this. That helps, and it's interesting that it's the more uplifting and celebratory songs that work best, perhaps due to them requiring some more choreography and . . . fun.  

It's a bit jarring to see Nayyar playing older than his actual age, and he is unsteady in the earliest scenes when he has to be miserly and mean without viewers seeing any of the background, but the performance really starts to work better once Sood is free of normal laws of space and time. Suter, Lott, and Marshall-Ellis aren't very good, I'm sorry to say, and that makes this particular incarnation of the Cratchit family a bit harder to care for than many others we've seen over the years. Longoria is fun, Porter brings some essential colour and joie de vivre to his role, and Dyer at least feels like a standard cheeky London cab driver. Chandran is very good in her role, aka the one who got away, and there are a lot of cast members with less screentime delivering very good work as they help to show a backstory that involves our lead being forcibly wrenched from his home in Uganda to start life anew here in Britain.

This isn't a new classic, compared to other Christmas movies and compared to other interpretations of A Christmas Carol, but it's a good attempt to mix the old and the new, and the way it reworks the backstory of the main character is admirable. I would rewatch it, but only if others had decided to hijack my TV for a couple of hours.

6/10

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Prime Time: Cinderella (2021)

Writer-director Kay Cannon has a number of films to her credit, but is arguably best known for her work on the Pitch Perfect movies. I enjoy the Pitch Perfect movies, despite them generally going along with the usual rules of diminishing returns. So I went into this new version of Cinderella with a sense of optimism that many others lacked. Even when the bad review started to appear, I tried to have a little faith in the idea that I would be simply entertained. That faith didn’t take long to start dissipating.

Cinderella isn’t terrible, not all of the time anyway. It’s just often not that good, and then some sequences get worse than that. And you have to tolerate small appearances from certain cast members that I just keep finding less and less tolerable each time I see them.

I won’t summarise them story. I cannot help you if you don’t know about poor Cinderella already. The titular character is played here by Camila Cabello, the Prince is played by Nicholas Galitzine, and the cruel stepmother is played by Idina Menzel. Pierce Brosnan, Minnie Driver, and Tallulah Greive are the other royals, Billy Porter takes on the fairy godmother role, although it is reworked slightly, and British panel shows were robbed to place Rob Beckett, James Acaster, Romesh Ranganathan in amongst the fairytale antics. And James Corden gets some screentime, unfortunately. 

Mainly placing itself in that specific category now known as “jukebox musicals”, Cinderella starts off well enough, with an enjoyable mash-up that includes the excellent “Rhythm Nation”. It’s a shame that the rest of the film doesn’t do as well, with most of the other song choices being mistreated by their rearrangements. A Queen song is murdered, an En Vogue song just reminded me of their appearance in Coming 2 America, and the less said about “Seven Nation Army” the better.

Cannon knows what she wants to present to viewers, and she delivers something obviously straining to blend the modern and cool with all of the traditional fairytale moments that you expect. This is olde worlde antics with modern sensibilities laid over everything, but it doesn’t work as well as it could.

A big reason for that is cast. The “old guard” have a lot of fun in their roles, particularly Brosnan and Driver, but the leads fail to convey any real sense of them actually enjoying themselves. I don’t like the singing style of Cabello (all whiney, quivering, use of five syllables in words where two are present) and she doesn’t have the right presence to hold your attention in the non-singing parts. Galitzine is no better, lacking charisma and unable to sell either the heart or humour in his main scenes. Porter is fun in his small amount of screentime, which is really just one main scene, and Maddie Baillio and Charlotte Spencer raise some smiles as “the ugly sisters”, but it must be said that the British personalities don’t get enough to do, so are just there to prompt thoughts of “oh, look who it is” when they appear. At least Nandi Bushell also gets to join in with the fun for all of two seconds.

Fairytales have been adapted and twisted so often over the past few decades that you are spoilt for choice. Almost all of the other movies you could think of, right now, are better than this. It isn’t absolutely terrible. It is just a mess that consistently feels like it is trying to hard to be clever and cool, while rarely managing to be either.

4/10

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