Christmas Inheritance

Dir: Ernie Barbarash

2017

*

Christmas films are generally awful, but that’s fine, we all know they are, they’re something you watch once a year and don’t take too seriously. You have to have a bad Christmas film on in the background while decorating the tree or wrapping presents, you’re drinking whiskey and port anyway, so it never seems that bad. In fact, who on earth wants to watch a good Christmas film? Trick question really, as they are pretty much all bad. However, some Christmas films are worse than others and in the last decade or so the genre has reached new lows. Christmas Inheritance is one of those lows. It seems that Christmas films these days don’t really have to have anything to do with Christmas itself, Christmas merely has to be happening in the background. While this adds weight to the ‘Is Die Hard a Christmas film?’ question, it is generally met with frustration because unlike Die Hard, they usually have the word Christmas in the title. Ernie Barbarash takes a break from directing cheap action-thrillers and helms this seasonal horror based on a script by Dinah Eng who, amazingly, is still selling her work after 2015’s ‘Reluctant Nanny’. It tells the age-old tale of spoiled brat has her credit cards taken away and sent to ‘the real world’ to see if she can cope. The fact that her father created her brattishness and seems to take zero responsibility is typically overlooked – as is the fact that it is clearly the middle of the summer. Eliza Taylor, who is basically a healthy version of Reece Witherspoon, plays Ellen Langford, heiress to a large corporation who is sent to the small northern town of Snow Falls (where else) where her father was born and where he started the business. Here she is told to deliver a Christmas letter to her father’s business partner as he doesn’t use email and it has become something of a pointless tradition. Tradition it seems is the true meaning of Christmas, without really exploring the origins and indeed, the point of said tradition. There is a lot of City vs Country nonsense and the stereotypical clichés go flying, although these are dealt out in such a lazy fashion that most are forgotten about mid scene. Jake Lacy plays the love-interest, a small town boy who is still traumatised by being dumped by a city girl years before. While Taylor isn’t a great actor, she shines in comparison to Lacy, who stands there for most of the film like a cross-eyed cardboard cut-out who can’t decide which side of his head to have his parting. Their characters of course fall in love and rebound relationships are nothing to worry about during Christmas, so all is well that ends well. Not that the film ends well but it does eventually end. The cheesy Christmas message is unclear and a whole town that is owned by a major corporation seems to be okay with the realisation but it ends and that is the main thing and indeed the best thing about the film.