I don’t go to movies anymore. The last two I have seen in a theater were What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist?, both produced and directed by my friend Justin Folk. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, I didn’t leave the movies, the movies left me.
But there is entertainment value in following the ongoing demise of the film industry. This review of a British film called Christmas Karma, by Robbie Collin in the Telegraph, is a classic:
Reviewing this perky modern musical take on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with any degree of honesty feels like kicking Tiny Tim down a fire escape. Christmas Karma is a film made with the best intentions by some lovely human beings, but which keeps finding new and spine-twistingly embarrassing ways to fall on its face.
The recipient of The Telegraph’s first zero-star film review since Cats in 2019…
A zero-star review. Harsh!
…hails from the same school of indigestible seasonal tat as Nativity 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey? It is among the worst things to happen to Christmas since King Herod.
That is a great line. What makes the movie so bad?
Christmas Karma draws on Chadha’s Indian heritage: its Scrooge figure, played by a perpetually confused-looking Kunal Nayyar from The Big Bang Theory, is called Mr Sood.
This pinstriped misanthrope came to the UK following Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s south Asian population in 1972, though having capably feathered his own nest in the years since, he’s now intent on pulling up the ladder behind him: no more refugees, the country’s full.
So, in addition to a cosmic level of ineptitude, the movie has a pro-third world immigration theme. Sood’s misguided idea being, apparently, that Britain is full-up with sex offenders and doesn’t need any more.
Of course three spirits arrive to show him the error of his ways, heralded by Sood’s late partner Marley, who takes the genuinely blood-curdling form of a CGI Hugh Bonneville. The casting here baffles relentlessly: the ghosts are played respectively by Eva Longoria (in inexplicable Day of the Dead make-up that renders her unrecognisable), the Broadway star Billy Porter and Boy George – whose bulky black shroud, when shot on the pavement in broad daylight, makes him look like he’s been left out for the bin men.
Boy George goes from Karma Chameleon to Christmas Karma. Coincidence? I think not.
The music is awful, too. And this is wonderful: Tiny Tim’s exit line is a toast to the National Health Service!
When Tiny Tim croakingly toasts the NHS over Christmas lunch (never mind that he has to travel to Switzerland for private treatment for an unspecified illness), my toes almost curled into shopping-trolley wheels. It is like watching British cinema undergo a deathbed hallucination.
Only liberalism can produce “art” this bad. Still, if you want to find a silver lining, Christmas Karma suggests that Hollywood is not alone in its decline into irrelevance.
