Christmas With You is another in the long line of half-baked festive flicks on Netflix – and this one's plot feels like poorly written fanfic, alas. (We say poorly written because there are some good fanfics out there!)
It follows pop star Angelina (Aimee Garcia, Lucifer) who escapes from her daily life – struggling for inspiration, a fake relationship with a telenovela star, the threat of becoming obsolete – to grant young fan Cristina's (Deja Monique Cruz) wish in small-town New York.
While there, she finds not only inspiration for a new hit, but love (duh, it's Christmas) with the young girl's dad Miguel (Freddie Prinze Jr) who aspired once to a music career of his own. But the real question at the heart of Christmas With You is 'How many dead moms does it take to make a Christmas movie?'
The answer in this one is two: both Angelina and Cristina are mourning the deaths of their mothers, and for Cristina it's on the cusp of her quinceañera. We saw it recently in the much better Falling for Christmas (sorry, Freddie! Lindsey's outdone you) but in that case, the ramifications of a mother's death had tangible implications to the plot and the characters' actions.
In Christmas With You, it's merely a shortcut to create emotion where there is none. The only positive thing worth noting is the seamlessness with which Spanish is slipped into the dialogue — it's just unfortunately that what they have to say, regardless of language, is contrived and hackneyed.
Yes, it's a Christmas rom-com so really we can't blame it for being what it is – subject to the whims of the genre. But in Christmas With You, the stakes are so unimaginably low, the relationships so vapid and the eventual reconciliations so forced that it is actually not enjoyable to watch.
Prinze tries his best to convey a sense of sheepish charm in single dad Miguel, but the script isn't there, and the total lack of chemistry between everyone on set is abysmal. There's a lot of eyebrow acting, and not in a good way, to make up for the absence of real emotion that one might convey in a subtle facial expression or well-placed sigh.
The problem with building a movie around a conceit that requires a kind of innate talent (cooking, singing, fashion design, rather than say running a hotel) is that you have to believe those doing the cooking, singing, or fashion designing are actually good at it.
While we have nothing negative to say about Garcia's voice, the music itself feels just as manufactured as everything else – there is none of that spark, that indescribable thing – true, sudden inspiration – that sneaks up on you (for an example of succeeding at this, go watch Once).
There is a strange kind of veneer over the whole film, and it makes you wonder how much of it was filmed in a studio with gallons of fake piped snow and green-screen Christmas trees were used. It's this facsimile of wintery magic that plagues the film like gone-off eggnog. Ho, ho, ho? No, no, no.
Christmas With You is now available on Netflix
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