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There’s not quite enough charm to go around in Netflix’s festive season opener A Merry Little Ex-Mas, a film that might have benefited from a release date a little closer to the big day. Maybe by then, we might have been more enveloped in the all-consuming excitement of Christmas to overlook its failings, but here in the post-Halloween, pre-Thanksgiving netherworld, there is no amount of fake snow or eggnog that can convince us to get on board.
It’s yet another one of the streamer’s mechanically assembled seasonal box-tickers – lead best known from the 90s/2000s, a budget of what looks like $13, some unfunny pratfalls, some city v small town tension, a visibly Canadian shoot, regressive gender roles – and will probably be lapped up by the same crowd who come back every year knowing exactly what to expect. It’s thankfully not as hideous as these can be (2023’s Heather Graham/Brandy sled-wreck Best. Christmas. Ever! remains as bad as things on both Netflix and in life itself can get) but it’s also not quite as passably fine as it should be (last year’s Christina Milian and Lindsay Lohan vehicles just about doing the job on that front).
This time, the throwback lead is Alicia Silverstone, an actor who showcased her comedic abilities at an early age in Clueless (released 30 years ago this past summer) and they help to power us through at least the early stages here. She’s paired with 2000s heartthrob Oliver Hudson, most familiar to the same fanbase for his role in Dawson’s Creek, playing her soon-to-be ex-husband. They’re Kate and Everett, longtime sweethearts now trying to engineer a mature divorce (frequently referred to as a “conscious uncoupling”, an unfunny and dated joke that gets unfunnier with repetition) and have decided to give their college-age children one last family Christmas together.
In an admirably ambitious animated opening, we see that Kate gave up her dreams of being an architect in Boston when she met Everett, following him to his absurdly named home town of Winterlight (“It’s like he grew up in a Yankee Candle,” she says in one of the film’s more knowing moments) so he could open up a local practice. She instead became mother and handywoman, putting her dream career aside, but years later an understandable level of resentment has led her to plot an escape from both her marriage and the idyllic, if restrictive, small town. There’s something interesting about the film acting as a sort of corrective sequel to the uneasy dynamic we’ve become used to seeing in these films – career-minded city woman gets seduced, and one might say tempered, by a man and a life of more traditional domesticity – and showing what might happen when the magic fades and reality sets in.
But any attempt to end their life together with heads held high comes crashing to the ground when Everett’s new girlfriend (played by an awkwardly over-egged Jameela Jamil) comes on to the scene. The script, from one-time Sabrina the Teenage Witch writer-producer Holly Hester (that show’s star Melissa Joan Hart also crops up as the subgenre’s standard wine-drinking quip-giver) briefly manages to add more texture than a simple case of replaced-by-a-younger-model jealousy. Kate, who gave up so much for Everett, now has to watch him give up the things she always asked from him but for a new woman instead. Was it all just to train him up to be the perfect husband for someone else?
Predictably, specificity subsides and broader, physical humour takes over, all of it unfunny not only for its lack of originality (ingredients include a shirtless stripper hunk, a Christmas tree fire and a sled accident) but for how it forces a mostly adequate cast into outsized cartoon acting that they can’t convincingly pull off. Silverstone’s easy charisma, and initial lived-in chemistry with Hudson, can’t overcome a script that isn’t witty or involving enough for us to care about another milquetoast Netflix family frantically hugging and grinning to show how close they are. The film is also cursed by a disappointing cop-out ending that undoes any of the initial good work over Kate’s thwarted professional ambitions, making one wish that the makers hadn’t even tried to limply, briefly pretend that we are in anything but the same by-the-book Hallmark universe as the rest of them. Here’s hoping the production line gives us something worth being even vaguely merry about next.
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Merry Little Ex-Mas is now available on Netflix
