HOLIDAY STUFFING
Operation Christmas Drop is just another friction-free rom-com offering from Netflix
Operation Christmas Drop
Netflix
The Netflix Christmas movie is now a genre unto itself, its ranks expanding every year by the flimsy, tinselly dozen. What its identifying esthetic features are — and how you might distinguish it, say, from a Hallmark or Lifetime variation — is a tough question: You'd have to remember any single one of them a season later to say for sure.
Some have Christmas princes, some have Kurt Russell, but almost all of Netflix's yuletide offerings blend seamlessly into a cheer-by-numbers mass, as sweetly bland and textureless as non-alcoholic eggnog.
There's nothing especially wrong with that, or with Operation Christmas Drop, a friction-free romantic comedy that faintly distinguishes itself from its snow-sprayed genre brethren with enticingly balmy South Pacific scenery.
If nothing else, it gives viewers something to daydream about while they keep half an eye on its story.
“Have you heard of a partridge in a pear tree? We've got a seagull in a coconut palm!” Such is the level of quippery in Operation Christmas Drop, that familiar type of rom-com in which general perkiness must suffice for the “com” part, while mutual amiability stands in for any “rom.”
Leads Kat Graham and Alexander Ludwig are cute as can be, vying with the beachscapes of Guam for smooth, unfettered prettiness, which is how things should be in this kind of holiday escapism: Everything here is decoration, including their characters' cursory backstories. She's a tightly wound Washington aide burying family issues beneath lofty career goals. He's a wholesome Air Force dude forever putting humanitarian projects before his personal relationships. Will they overcome their differences and work obligations to find love over Christmas? Yes! Do we care? No! Will we watch anyway? Sure, why not? Did I mention they're both really cute?
Amid the sparkly wish-fulfillment fantasy here is a sliver of something true. The title refers to an actual military mission, an annual Christmas tradition since 1952, whereby the U.S. air force airlifts large crates of essential supplies and gifts to deprived communities in Micronesia. An all-around Good Thing — which naturally makes it an apt target for fictional Scroogeian dealings in this perfunctory screenplay.
Politically indeterminate but icy congresswoman Angie Bradford (Virginia Madsen, looking like she's counting the days) has been appointed to make some tough cuts in the name of efficiency. Which puts the Guam
base at the top of her closure list. Boo! Hiss! Bah humbug!
Rather than cancel Christmas in the South Pacific herself, she sends her ladder-climbing lackey Erica (Graham) to the island to observe and report. The base, in turn, sends dreamy, huge-hearted captain Andrew (Ludwig) to show the bean-counter around, and persuade her that, just maybe, charity is not so bad after all.
Those new to the general concept of movies may be surprised to find that the rigidly professional D.C. tightwad and the upbeat military man despise each other at first, but that it only takes a day around the island's glinting beauty and his vast white-bread smile for her to come around. (Cue a whole lot of tourist-board aerial lensing.)
“I wonder if I've drifted too far from the real reason I got into politics in the first place,” she inevitably muses, and if the real reason was to go snorkelling with dashing pilots in the South Seas, she has our sympathies.
More than once, we're told “this is what Christmas is supposed to feel like.” Which, as it happens, is a cannily timed reminder in a pandemic year when many people won't be able to hold their usual family festivities. (In an accidental injection of topicality, the technical strains of togetherness-by-FaceTime are noted throughout.)