The unending expansion of Netflix, still easily the most streamed of all the streamers, has turned it into an ambitious one-stop shop for all, home to both the elegant and the gaudy. This gap is never clearer than at the end of the year when the platform’s prestigious Oscar-aiming fare is available alongside its cheapo Christmas movies, the same restaurant offering you both fillet mignon and beef jerky.
Just last week, on the same day that Netflix released Jacques Audiard’s acclaimed Cannes award-winning trans musical drama Emilia Pérez, it also launched Hot Frosty, a film starring Lacey Chabert as a woman falling for a snowman who comes to life. It’s part of the appeal, the multitudes within, but again, this season, it has highlighted what the people really want. While Emilia Pérez has failed to crack the top 10 most watched, Hot Frosty remains at number one (Audiard’s Oscar-buzzed movie is estimated to have entered 277,000 US households compared to the more than 1m reached by Christina Milian’s perfectly entertaining Christmas movie out the week before). Netflix paid a reported $12m to buy Emilia Perez at Cannes, a sum that could essentially fund the entire season of micro-budgeted festive movies.
So while viewers continue to shun the platform’s awards fare (last year saw Maestro, Nyad, Rustin, American Symphony, El Conde and May December all underwhelm), one can bet they will gravitate towards this week’s junky Christmas offering, the cheap and not quite cheerful enough comedy The Merry Gentlemen. One would usually expect something more commercial-leaning to outperform but the gap between the two ends of the streamer’s original content – from Hallmark to arthouse – feels larger than ever before.
There’s nothing distractingly bad about this one and there are perhaps enough boxes ticked for undemanding Christmas movie completists but because of the overcrowded space, there’s also nothing here that’s worth a click, not even the sight of Chad Michael Murray’s impressively maintained abs. The ex-One Tree Hill star, who recently played toy boy to Brooke Shields in Netflix’s summertime romcom Mother of the Bride, has them on display for a considerable amount of the movie, an attempt to liven up the formula with some sub-Magic Mike theatrics.
He plays second fiddle to Britt Robertson’s big city dancer Ashley, recently fired from her dream job as part of the Jingle Belles, a rubbishy version of the Rockettes. She heads back to her small-town home to find her parents struggling to keep their club-bar-venue afloat. After being inspired by Murray’s handyman working with his shirt off, she hatches a plan to raise funds with an all-male and all-PG rated stripper troupe (luckily both her sister’s partner, the bartender and her Uber driver all have muscles too). If enough horny female locals buy tickets (the town appears to have no gay residents), then she might be able to save the day.
It’s the classic tale of a woman lured back from the city by the charms of the small town (Be less ambitious! Be more married!) and while it’s slightly less gendered than the very worst of these films (we only get one scene of her cooking with her mother), it’s still preaching the same message. The potential raunch of the set-up is handled with maximum coyness and rather than even lightly dealing with the tensions that could arise from the increasingly puritanical world of small-town America handling a show built around female arousal, it’s just a delivery service for another by-the-numbers city girl meets small-town boy romance (despite being a successful Broadway dancer, Ashley is also, of course, an accident prone klutz in front of a man with a six-pack).
There are blink-and-missed flashes of self-awareness (a character watches another Netflix Christmas movie, Murray’s lumber-jock is referred to as a “Hallmark handyman”), but it’s mostly just autopilot fluff without enough charm or Christmas spirit to get us on board. Robertson, who was once pushed as Hollywood’s Next Best Thing in films like Tomorrowland and The Longest Ride, is too bland of a lead, her romance with Murray too cut-and-paste for us to care and the journey from debt to victory far too easy to wake anyone out of an eggnog coma. The stakes here are too low and so is the entertainment value. I predict another hit.
The Merry Gentlemen is now available on Netflix
