Christmas Eve

Dir: Mitch Davis

2015

*

Christmas films are generally awful, I've said it many times now and I'm yet to be proven wrong. The good Christmas film/Bad Christmas film ratio meter swings to the bad with some margin and with the arrival of Mitch Davis' Christmas Eve it went down a further few places. It will take at least five Miracles on 34th Street to get it back to where it was in 2014. The film features six separate stories that are connected by various characters. Each story happens simultaneously during a power outage during Christmas Eve in six separate elevators. One is in a Hospital where two Doctors, two interns and an unconscious patient with terminal illness are trapped, one contains a group of classical musicians on their way to a concert, one is on the edge of a skyscraper that is under construction, one is in an apartment building and the other is in an office. The trapped doctors lark about unprofessionally and discuss higher powers while the one atheist doctor is ridiculed for not believing in God. The evidence for God's existence being that the cheerful Doctor 'Just knows' and that seems good enough for everyone, ridicule justified. The apartment elevator features an aggressively flirtatious man and a timid women and a horrifically feeble attempt at justifying predatory behaviour. The classical musicians get to know each other, overact and go on a wild and unconvincing voyage of self-discovery while Sir Patrick Stewart performs a one man show on the side of a building. I hope Sir Patrick Stewart got paid a lot of money, even though he doesn't deserve it. The office elevator story is a little more pointless than the others (if that's possible) and serves only as a way to connect some of the unimportant aspects of the other stories. There is nothing 'Christmassy' about any of the characters, stories or situations. I think the overall message is supposed to be 'because God' but it's not exactly clear. It certainly didn't make a believer out of me although I do wonder whether this was the work of the Devil. The acting is beyond dreadful, it isn't in the least bit funny, moving or thought-provoking and I feel angry (yes, angry) that I wasted part of my life on it.