(courtesy IMDb)
There seems to be best described as the “Christmas Karma Effect” at work this festive season.
It roughly works on the basis that if you’re putting together a Christmas film, one that is supposed to be all heart and humanity, redemption and healing and warmhearted cosy vibes of the season, that you stick all the tropes you can think of onto Post-it Notes, take note of the emotions and moments you want to evoke and land on and then do as little as possible to connect them as possible.
It’s almost as if the writers and producers of films like Tinsel Town, and the aforementioned Christmas Karma, which had all the right parts but obviously terrible assembly instructions, threw all the pieces on the ground and tried to make sense of them like some badly grouped together flatpack furniture.
Directed by Chris Foggin to a screenplay created by Piers Ashworth, Adam Brown and Frazer Flintham – with additional wiring done by a slew of other names which is never a good sign, suggesting writing by committee – Tinsel Town should on paper, all of which decorated with Santas and elves and candy canes since subtle this movie is not, be one of those festive classics you revisit any time you need a shot in the arm about the innate goodness and redemptive power of humanity at its best.
And good lord, it does give it a reasonable shot.
Tinsel Town sees an actor rapidly on the slide to career oblivion, at his own hand thanks to arrogance, a general air of couldn’t give a stuff about anyone but himself and terrible choice in movie projects – the film begins with a scene from one of them and it’s as awful as you’d expect, making you wonder how someone like the lead Bradley Mack (Kiefer Sutherland in laudable deprecatory mode) – with his only option being to do some theatre in the UK,, far away from the bright lights on Hollywood which are rapidly dimming on him.
No one like him; his agent fires him, his lawyer only turns up because his NDAs alone are paying for her pool – somehow she ends up defending him in a British court, just one of the annoying absurdities that litter this half-baked mess – and pretty the case of the pantomime he is leading in the pretty UK town of Stoneford can’t stand him either.
And who can blame them?
He is petulant, difficult, rude, arrogant and possessed of little to no redeeming features whatsoever, which is a problem for a film like Tinsel Town which needs its protagonist to be unlikeable but so unlikeable that you wouldn’t really mind if something terrible happens to them before the Ghost of Christmas Past or something equally transformative in its festive impact can work their redemptive magic.
Sutherland does his best to make Mac a loveable buffoon who isn’t innately bad and will realise the grave error of his ways when he encounters the good, earnest souls of the Theatre Royal in Stoneford, but what we get it is a nasty, childishly brusque person who, thanks to the narrative skill of Tinsel Town, of which there is precious little, magically becomes a nicer person, somehow between scenes.
There’s a lot of that going down in Tinsel Town.
When Bradley meets the cast and crew of Cinderella, the pantomime which will earn the theatre company some three million pounds and set it up financially for the year ahead, everyone fawns over him including director Cassandra (Meera Syal), nascent would-be lovebirds Callum and Izzy (Lucien Laviscount and Savannah Lee Smith respectively), who play Prince Charming and Cinderella and theatre manager Albert (Derek Jacobi) who anchors the film emotionally far better than its lead or story can manage except for choreographer Jill (Rebel Wilson) who is inexplicably rude and dismissive.
It’s never entirely established why that is; the only explanation is that one of the Post-it Note narrative touchpoints said “Opposites attract romcom” and the writers diligently made that happen with the grace and dexterity of a crane dropping a freshly-cut Christmas tree onto a carpark.
But before you know it, she has thawed, Bradley bonds with her – again this all seems to happen so instantaneously and haphazardly that one scene they can’t stand each other and the next they are soul mates sharing life’s tragedies and joy; there’s not a hint of meaningful character development – and they are besties, and of course, well on their way to being more.
It’s as if the fairy godmother of the pantomime story is simply waving her wand like a mildly magical supernatural entity on giddy speed and making the Post-it Note wishlist of festive story ingredients come to life with little or no reason for being or lead-up.
It means that while there are some genuinely sweet moments like Albert sharing the painful loss of his husband some years earlier, a terrible blow anyway but even more so when they used to act together as the ugly stepsisters in Cinderella pantos across the country, or Bradley’s estrange young daughter Emma (Miranda Firth) loving him, Stoneford and the entire cast of the show near instantly, none of it lands in any kind of meaningful way.
Everything is there from the protagonist in need of big buckets of redemption to the quirky townspeople such as Nigel (Mawaan Rizwan) who seems to hold every job in town to the cast of the show who are sweetly offbeat but earnest and a general air of British Christmasness but none of it coalesces or properly connects or sticks the emotionally impactful landing.
Instead you’re left scratching your head as enemies unaccountably become friends, a bitter failing actor finds a love for panto out of seeming nowhere, court cases are held near instantly with little rhyme or reason and men fight laughably at petrol stations (and became instant friends almost immediately) and wondering how all this potential festive goodness goes precisely nowhere, leaving Tinsel Town feeling like all kinds of good Christmas intentions with no actual worthwhile execution, festive feelings of goodness and joy searching for a place to land which, alas, they never find.