WARNING: this film may be bad for your elf!
CHRISTMAS films have no right to come out halfway through November, but at least it means that this one, the first turkey of the season, written by and starring Emma Thompson, might be forgotten by the time the festive period actually begins.
Set in London and trying ever so hard to be as slick and whimsical as Love Actually (2003), it’s a truly indigestible feast of bad acting, risible dialogue, daft plotting, lazy slapstick, and a supernatural final-act twist that, if nothing else, makes some sense of all the nonsense that has gone before.
Unhelpfully, the audience might well have scarpered by then. Last Christmas also
features the music of George Michael, from which, indeed, it derives its title.
Emilia Clarke plays Kate, promiscuous, messed-up daughter of Croatian immigrant parents. She’s a huge George Michael fan, who eventually falls — Wham! — for a handsome stranger called Tom (Henry Golding, more or less reprising his role in last year’s wildly overrated Crazy Rich Asians, as the wholesome-butwooden love interest). When she’s not mooning after Tom, Kate spends her time working in a shop selling Christmas kitsch and trying to avoid her overbearing mother (Thompson, working hard on the Balkan gutturals).
One of the reasons her mum is concerned about her is that Kate has had a heart transplant, cue lots of wry metaphorical poignancy, as she goes from being heartless, to having her heart broken, to finally becoming bighearted. You couldn’t make it up, except, alas, that Thompson did.
It’s no great surprise throughout all this to find Clarke over-acting terribly; she gave a similarly tiresome performance in 2016’s painful Me Before You. She might have been fine on Game Of Thrones, but the big screen magnifies her many annoying mannerisms.
The script, every line a quip, doesn’t help. More unexpectedly, the director is Paul Feig, whose credits include Bridesmaids (2011). Both he and Thompson might want to wipe this off their CV.
In short, don’t let anyone wake you up before they go-go. You’ll wish you’d stayed in bed.
A longer version of this review ran in Tuesday’s paper.