'Last Christmas' A Review

Last Christmas is a holiday dramedy about Kate(Emilia Clarke), an aspiring singer, who works as an elf at a Christmas shop for "Santa"(Michelle Yeoh) the proprietor. After contracting a life threatening illness and being saved by a heart transplant Kate is listless, irresponsible, and searching. Outside the shop she randomly encounters Tom(Henry Golding) and the two strike up a bizarre friendship. Through that friendship Kate gets her life back on track and repairs relationships with her estranged family.

Clarke has considerable charm but has yet to find a role that she can really run with. Here she is charismatic and clearly has a facility with humor but the character is relatively thin and the story so broad no clear arch is carved out for its supposed lead. Yeoh is the clear stand out of the cast, she has wonderful chemistry with Clarke, is funny and conveys an easy authenticity in the unfortunately limited screen time she's given. Golding, also charming, but again, through no real fault of his, he's given a mystifying premise within which to operate, and is sufficient but hardly intriguing. Emma Thompson(also one of the screenwriters) as Kate's mother is a baffling Eastern European stereotype, broad to the point of absurdity, which further exasperates the movie's biggest problem- it's tonal confusion.

Similar to director Paul Feig's most recent perplexing attempt at genre blending A Simple Favor, it is unclear what Last Christmas is actually aiming to be. Is it a romantic comedy, feel-good holiday fodder, adult coming-of-age drama, political satire? At various points the story lunges at each of these but never actually commits to any of them and what we are left with is a confusing mess of ideas tied together by decent actors who are simply willing themselves through a plot that is, if you stop to consider it, woefully underbaked.

A messy xmas movie with good intentions, fair execution, but with a DOA script.

Stream It.