(courtesy IMP Awards)
Have you ever fired up a promising movie on a streaming platform, especially a festive one, only to find that it disappoints at every turn?
Of course you have – it’s what watching most Netflix movies feels like alas, and while hope springs to eternal and all that, especially at Christmastime when life is supposed to be all kinds of never-disappointing wonderful, it is seemingly unable to leap into these films and wrest them into something that feels like it’s worth your precious time.
On paper, and naturally in trailer, Meet Me Next Christmas, looks like it’s going to be all the good and sparkly tinsely things that the season is capable of delivering and which we fully expect, and if we’re honest, demand, it to pony up for us.
It has all the literal festive trimmings and a woman-meets-a-man (two men in fact!) plot that we all know is going to transform her life and make all the sadness of her recent break-up – the boyfriend isn’t into Christmas and boo hiss not into Pentatonix for which Meet Me Next Christmas is essentially one long commercial – goes so far away she will wonder if she ever felt it at all.
If only we were so lucky.
What we get instead of buoyant true love and a robust story of two people falling in love is a film that desperately tries to slide all the pleasingly pieces into a coherent and emotionally satisfying whole, but which fails at just about every turn.
It’s not for want of trying to be fair; from the snowed-in opening scene that kicks off Meet Me Next Christmas where life-changing NGO worker Layla (Christina Milian), who gets disadvantaged Black kids into the college of their dreams, is stuck at Philly airport where she meets Teddy (Devane Ellis) and James (Kofi Siriboe) to a year later where Christmas is in full swing again, Meet Me Next Christmas pulls out all the Christmas stops.
There are lights, and presents and cute pajama sets and Layla’s BFF Roxy (Tymika Tafari) who is as warm and inclusively supportive as you want the season to be, and even a sort of sleigh ride through New York City (which is actually Toronto and while there are yellow taxis and subway entrances, its patently obvious, even if you have a passing familiarity to NYC, that we are NOT THERE).
Meet Me Next Christmas wants to be an all-enveloping Christmas experience and in some ways it succeeds, visually and even emotionally as all the kind and wonderful things you hope the season will deliver all make an almost obligatory appearance.
So, three cheers to writers Camilla Rubis and Molly Haldeman, and director Rusty Cundieff, for doing their best to make the film look and feel the part and to make all our Christmases, but most especially, Layla’s come true.
But sadly intent is not execution, and Meet Me Next Christmas wants to be your festive cinematic BFF, it is actually that annoying uncle you see once a year who doesn’t quite get how normal people are supposed to behave.
While the scenes are in and of themselves fun and sweet, on the surface at least, there’s never any sense of fun or momentum building in any kind of meaningful way, and while it’s clear that Milian and Ellis have chemistry to burn, and have the acting chops to make their festively threadbare lines almost sing – and honestly, the reason this reviewer stuck with the film for its full 106-minutes runtime was because the two leads are so playfully engaging – Meet Me Next Christmas feels like a series of wannabe warm-and-fuzzy Christmas scenes that don’t quite line up into anything that makes you swoon.
And you are supposed to be swooning at the wondrously festive love of it all.
But you don’t, and so, when Layla and Teddy, the latter is helping the former to get impossible-to-get Pentatonix tickets so she can follow through on a commitment to meet the man of her dreams, James – but guess what? He’s not the one she falls for; no surprises who it is not, and no, you will not an eggnog-filled trophy for guessing correctly – arrive at the concert on the big night, and the inevitable happens, all in public mind you, you kind of shrug in a “I’m supposed to feel something, right?”
But Meet Me Next Christmas hasn’t earned its big finale, and while Milian and Ellis are, again, great together and you’re willing the film to be worthy of their chemistry, it all falls rather and unimpactfully flat.
It doesn’t help things that the film is contractually obligated to mention Pentatonix every 2.5 seconds; while yes, they are a major part of the plot, and are lowkey delightful throughout – Teddy is DM-ing them all through the film and keeping them updated on their cross New York/Toronto race to get tickets (and yes, you wonder why Pentatonic don’t just give them a couple of freebies?! Plot killer, sure, but it would have spared us a lot of pointless narrative angst and exhaustion) – the way they appear is like a 1960s sitcom or Hanna Barbera cartoon where a famous musical name are shoehorned clumsily and brutally into a plot with all the grace of splinter-spewing square pegs into a round hole.
It becomes grindingly exhausting when people LOVE Pentatonix, when they play Pentatonix clips, when they gush about their favourite Pentatonix songs, when Pentatonix are referenced in the vaguest but narratively contractual kinds of ways – see how annoying the repetition of the band’s name is? Try having that assaulting your ears over and over again – and while the band seem quite lovely and their music harmoniously lovely, the truth is they are the barest of plot devices that doesn’t give the story enough to bound off of and to spark from.
Full to the concert hall roof with plot holes and scenes that never feel like a part of a fun and engaging hole, Meet Me Next Christmas is a film you survive, not adore, and while it does have some festive vibes and the leads are a delight, it never quite adds to a great big festive classic and disappears in a wisp at the end like the fake snow flying around in the midst of what you can only assume was filming in July.
Meet Me Next Christmas streams on Netflix.