What on earth did I just watch? It’s a Christmas film, yes, but it’s so bad … Part of the PR described it as Home Alone … but that film is fun and engaging. This was just slow and boring.
It opens with a couple of thieves (Michael Madsen and Tom Arnold), dressed as Santa and an Elf (well, it is Christmas) who rob a Magician’s house in a street. Next door, or down the road, it’s not clear, lives a policewoman and her two young kids. As she is called out to investigate the robbery, the thieves break into her house, where the kids mistake the pair for the real Santa and an Elf. Or the babysitter. But it doesn’t really matter as the kids won’t go to sleep without a story, and so Madsen decides to read them something from a book he stole from the other house – which happened to belong to a magician … so this book is basically a ‘graphic novel’ where various cute characters try to deliver Christmas presents. And so the poor cartoons run as Madsen and the kids talk over them as they have no music of their own, and no dialogue either.
And that’s about it. The policewoman bumbles about outside, the kids listen to the stories, we watch interminable cartoons, and nothing happens. I kept waiting for the payoff but there isn’t one. I think we’re meant to believe that these hardened criminals are redeemed by the stories or something, but it’s all so boring. The music is awful: a sort of cod, twee, Christmassy noise which runs through the film. The cartoons are dreadful.
In fact, I suspect that the cartoons came first, they couldn’t sell them though so they decided to wrap them into a film. They needn’t have bothered.
It’s really hard to find anything positive to say about this film. It ends. There you go … it does end. Eventually. You might have bored yourself to death by this time though. Be warned.
Slow and boring
Movie title: Christmas Thieves
Movie description: Two young kids end up spending Christmas eve alone and they mistake two burglars for Santa
Date published: November 19, 2021
Country: UK
Duration: 1h 17min
Director(s): Francesco Cinquemani
Actor(s): Tom Arnold, Michael Madsen, Douglas Dean, Gabriele Greggio
Genre: Animation, Comedy, Family
David J Howe, is the author and co-author of numerous books about the TV Show “Doctor Who”, as well as being a freelance writer and Editorial Director of Telos Publishing Ltd.
