That Christmas (now on Netflix) prompts one to wonder how it took this long for Brian Cox to play Santa Claus. Granted, he’s only the voice of ol’ Saint Nick in this animated holiday movie, but it’s better than nothing, I guess. The bigger hook for the film might be the involvement of Richard Curtis, who we know as the writer-director of love-it-or-hate-it Christmas classic rom-com Love Actually (and of course a few non-Christmas rom-coms we unequivocally love, among them Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral). But we might not know him as a children’s book author, three of which form the basis of That Christmas, about a big Christmas storm that causes gentle mayhem in a small seaside town.
The Gist: All the arrows on the weather-prediction map point to Wellington-on-Sea, a wee town on the UK coast that’s about to get roughly seven hundred quintillion snowflakes jumped on it. Maybe even more. It’s such a nutty storm, even Santa (Cox) needs an assist from the local lighthouse keeper to find his way through the blizzard. He and his sleigh and one last survivor of a reindeer skid to a precarious halt on a rooftop, and although Dasher (Guz Khan) is ready to call it, Santa knows this town needs the kind of joy he brings, so he bears down and gets to work. It ain’t always easy being the icon of the biggest holiday ever, but hey, when you work one day a year, you can’t really complain.
Now we jump back a couple days before Xmas so we can meet All The Characters. There’s Danny (Jack Wisniewski), the lonely kid with a single mom (Jodie Whittaker) – is she a nurse? Is a single mom character in any movie allowed to have a job that isn’t a nurse? – and an absentee dad. He has a crush on Sam (Zazie Hayhurst), who worries that her identical twin Charlie (Sienna Sayer) is too naughty to earn a visit from Santa. Sam wrote the school play, which reimagines the story of Jesus, Mary and Joseph with a Spice Girls/Madonna soundtrack, children in broccoli costumes and messages about climate change. The director is Bernie (India Brown), an early-teen/late-tween who has a toddler sister Eve (Bronte Smith), and they live with their parents in some kind of commune-type setting with a couple other families (I didn’t see a cult leader, so we can probably safely assume the adults are all aging hippies). And the local overly strict and joyless schoolteacher is Miss Trapper (Fiona Shaw), who makes a battleaxe look like a cuticle trimmer, and who made me break out into a cold sweat while reminiscing unfondly about my seventh-grade algebra teacher. I remember you, Mrs. Simmons, and your infernal multiplication quizzes. I remember you.
Anyway. The storm dumps its load, takes a breath, and dumps some more. School is canceled, Christmas Eve dawns and mini-conflicts arise. Danny is left alone, because his mom works a lot, and a visit from his father is snuffed out by the snow – and then he notices that Miss Trapper is all by herself too. Sam frets that she won’t get a guitar from Santa (see what I did there?) because Charlie’s shenanigans – the latest of which finds her freeing a farmful of turkeys so they don’t get eaten for Xmas dinner – will ward him away from their chimney. And Bernie is left in charge of a cadre of commune children when their parents get stranded in the storm after their VW bus (yep, definitely hippies) careens off the road. So much for Christmas togetherness, right? At least in a couple of these subplots, anyway.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I haven’t been this underwhelmed by a family-friendly animated holiday movie since Arthur Christmas. Remember Arthur Christmas? Barely? Well, you’ll barely remember That Christmas too. (Also: Not to be confused with This Christmas or Last Christmas!)
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: One could make a strong case that Curtis single-handedly keeps the career of Bill Nighy – he voices the lighthouse keeper here – relevant.
Memorable Dialogue: About that play. It’s described as “a strictly vegetarian, multicultural funfest with lots of pop songs and stuff about climate change.” I think that’s satire?
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Shocker, there’s a couple of defanged Love Actuallyisms in this plot, e.g., the lovelorn kid and the festive stage extravaganza. (There’s even a scene where the characters watch the film, unanimated, on TV.) But none of them lifts That Christmas out of an overly familiar mire of generic holiday sentiment that forces Cox to recite cheesy voiceover narration like “the only gift they ever needed was each other” overtop bland, ho-ho-ho-hum animation. Very little about this movie stands out above the Xmas din.
To be fair, there’s far less-pleasant stuff to watch than That Christmas’ too many characters’ semi-aimless dithering and farting around in this loosey-Christmas-goosey plot. There’s nothing here to get you in a tizzy beyond one of the children wandering off in the storm, because the movie apparently really really needed a random conflict in the final 20 minutes to keep it from feeling too inconsequential. If you ask me, it could stand to be less consequential and lean into a depiction of the minor struggles of daily life, thus avoiding the familiarity of off-the-shelf ready-made just-add-water movie-plot mixes. But as is, it’s generally acceptable viewing fodder for families in spite of being mostly forgettable, the movie equivalent of a snowflake that dissolves the instant it drifts into your hot cocoa.
Our Call: Those looking for a Very Just Fine Christmas movie, look no further and STREAM IT. Just don’t expect Actually animated.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.