THE STORY – A blizzard hits a seaside town, setting off entwined tales of family, friends, love and loneliness – and Santa making a big mistake.
THE CAST – Brian Cox, Fiona Shaw, Jodie Whittaker & Bill Nighy
THE TEAM – Simon Otto (Director), Richard Curtis & Peter Souter (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
Richard Curtis has created his fair share of mawkish onscreen Christmas moments, but surprisingly, the creator of “Love, Actually” and “About Time” has never made a film expressly for children. He rectifies that gap in his resumé with “That Christmas,” an adaptation of three of his bestselling children’s books. The attempt to marry three barely connected stories together is just the tip of the iceberg of chaos. This adaptation is a sappy and hyper mess explicitly designed to appeal solely to younger viewers.
The mania begins straight away, as Santa Claus barrels in from a stormy sky on Christmas Eve towards the English seaside town of Wellington-on-Sea, determined that the worst snowstorm imaginable won’t stop him from getting his job done. Brian Cox voices Old Saint Nick; you may wonder why Santa is Scottish now, but at least he doesn’t treat the children he’s delivering to like Logan Roy treats his own offspring. British comedian Guz Khan voices his reindeer Dance; this combination of an inexplicably Scottish lead character and his fast-talking animal comic relief worked far better for “Shrek” 25 years ago, but no one’s going to accuse “That Christmas” of originality.
The voice cast of “That Christmas” is its biggest selling point, though most of them get shortchanged in screen time, and their characters are thinly written at best. Bill Nighy gets about three lines of dialogue as Bill, the lighthouse keeper. He’s introduced briefly at the start, just to have him in place when a late plot development requires his presence. Every plot device, notable actor, and needle drop in “That Christmas” is out of necessity rather than any great urge to tell a compelling story. It’s not a British animation if Bill Nighy’s not in it, it’s not a contemporary kids’ movie if they don’t get to have a dance party to a Dua Lipa track, and it’s not a Christmas movie without shoveling forced sentiment at you at every opportunity.
From his arrival on a roof (Complete with one of many jokes about Santa’s sack getting damaged, ho ho ho), “That Christmas” flashes back to days before, when the town’s schoolchildren put on their nativity play. Dashing behind the scenes of the play, we’re introduced to the various child characters, their parents sitting in the crowd, and the animation style, which is just too indebted to previous animations to stand out. The children’s books borrow heavily from the humans in “Despicable Me” but look more plastic and overlit. Locksmith Animation’s previous project was the slight but sweet “Ron’s Gone Wrong,” which had a similar style but a stronger, tighter script. “That Christmas” is trying to do far too much within relatively modest limitations. Director Simon Otto is an experienced animator (having worked on “Kung Fu Panda” and “How To Train Your Dragon“). Still, he’s hamstrung by a budget and script that can only facilitate intermittent bursts of imagination. Some wide landscapes and aerial shots are pretty, but they’re few and far between.
At a bare 90 minutes, the hyperactive, kiddie-friendly pace tempts Curtis and co-screenwriter Peter Souter to shove too much into their plots. One story sees a pair of twins (One naughty, one nice, of course) deal with the fallout when Santa mixes them up, while three families of children band together to make their dream Christmas Day when their parents get caught in the snowstorm. These are crammed with high-speed antics, grating pop culture references that will age the film horrendously (“Said no-one ever”), and forced delivery from the second-tier cast members. The kids are expectedly precocious, and the adult actors exaggerate every line as if talking down to their young audience. There’s also a depressing materialism at the core of “That Christmas,” with children using their candy and gifts from Santa to overcome their parents’ absence, while one child saves the day with a gift that Father Christmas bought. Much like Curtis’ other output, the artifice of the emotions is compounded by the emptiness of its characters, and that’s a gap that all the presents in the world can’t fill.
The strongest plot element sees young Danny (Jack Wisniewski) threatened with spending Christmas Day alone after his mother (Jodie Whittaker) has to work and his absentee father doesn’t show up. The unlikely bond he forms with crabby schoolmistress Ms. Trapper is the closest “That Christmas” comes to plucking the heartstrings, and it helps that veteran actress Fiona Shaw finds the heart underneath the teacher’s cold front in her performance. By the end, though, even this plotline gets subsumed into a climactic sequence that attempts to redress the dearth of emotion and tension in the rest of the film.
“That Christmas” contains one great gag when Curtis pokes fun at his most famous Christmas creation, “Love, Actually.” However, that joke is about all that will engage adults. The rest is a sugar rush of color, chaos, and cringing emotionality that will likely engage if you’re seven years old. “That Christmas” is engineered to keep the kids busy around 4 pm on Christmas Day while Mom and Dad sip their third Irish coffee in peace.
