Falling for Christmas is an instantly forgettable Holiday rom-com

What the Netflix Christmas Movie – otherwise known as the Netflix Romantic Comedy for the rest of the year – needs is a Hollywood-centric Kitchen Nightmares (“Studio Nightmares”) episode, where someone like Gordon Ramsay visits the writers room and the production set, gets shocked by the sheer conveyor-belt nature of content being churned out, yells at every executive for serving ‘customers’ stale fare, chastises the bosses, and then miraculously turns their creative vision around in a week. You can bet that Falling for Christmas is the spirit-breaking dish that forced the renovation montage. This is a movie so casually bereft of originality, creativity, warmth and heart that you wonder how an industry once famed for its cutesy Home Alone-style festival fare has regressed this far in two decades. I can imagine the critical reactions to this film ranging from “meh” to “not bad,” but the collective dip in viewer IQ in terms of how forgiving we are towards mediocre-but-nostalgic Christmas stories is, to put it mildly, embarrassing. Falling for Christmas stars perennial comeback queen Lindsay Lohan as spoiled hotel heiress Sierra Belmont, who gets amnesia in a skiing accident and finds herself reformed in the care of a humble lodge owner (the synopsis says “blue-collar lodge owner” to drive home her transformation) and his little daughter. Slumming it out in a cozy Utah lodge in December is tough. I get that the whole point of a modern rom-com is to be silly and illogical and a parody of itself, but this one takes the vegan cake. Sierra goes missing when she falls off a cliff along with her ditzy influencer boyfriend Tad (as in tad obnoxious) during his proposal. She is found and taken to the hospital by hunky-but-kind Jake (Chord Overstreet), the small-time lodge owner whose desperate business proposal was recently rejected by Sierra’s father. For some reason, the doctor declares that the best way to heal a whiny amnesia patient with no ID and phone on her is…to have her shack up at stranger Jake’s lodge. Apparently, it’s good for the memory. Just like ants are.

For an allegedly kind single father whose poor business sense, Jake isn’t the nobleman the film insists he is: Not once does he try to find anyone that might know Sierra in the small ski-town. It’s not rocket science; it’s just basic human nature. He lets her stay – under the name ‘Sarah’ – without any sense of urgency or desire to discover her original identity. It might have been a nice twist if Sierra was pretending to have amnesia all along so that she could break out of her cagey life, but the film is too factory-designed to bother with such treacherous challenges. The narrative also follows the wilderness adventures of Tad, who finds himself phoneless, living with a bearded poacher and going all David Rose on the class-divided air that surrounds him. There’s absolutely no entertainment derived out of his track, except that the makers think it’s still funny when rich people get stuck in sticky element situations in 2022. Sierra’s reformation arc at the lodge, too, is full of dull tropes, half-baked dialogue and near-kiss fatigue. She learns to be self-sufficient, makes her own bed, cooks a mean crepe, and basically considers herself a “peasant” without knowing that she’s Paris Hilton in The Simple Life. Perhaps the creepiest thing about the movie is that it’s oblivious to how Sierra’s blossoming love story with Jake is replete with daddy issues. Sierra’s father is a single parent who brings her up to be a brat, while Jake is a single dad who is ‘bringing her up’ to be an anti-brat. It’s like being given a second chance to be nurtured in the right way. She is falling for ‘Father’ Christmas, in more ways than one. Thankfully, there is no chemistry between the two; when sparks do fly, it’s like watching two siblings wondering how to get along better. It doesn’t help that Lohan is weirdly inert as Sierra; the close-ups do not compliment her rusty facial expressions. In the early portions, she seems to be spoofing rich people, and later, she seems to be spoofing the coming-of-age epiphanies of Freaky Friday. It’s an uneven performance that just doesn’t ignite the sort of presence she radiated in her The Parent Trap years. The others – including TV veteran Jack Wagner as Sierra’s hotel-magnate father – are adequate at best. Director Janeen Damian lacks a distinctive voice; it merely feels like she’s been hired to make a glorified promotional video for Lohan and American snow. Ironically, it’s the viewer who – just like the protagonist – struggles to remember a single frame moments after being hit on the head by this unambitious and wasteful Christmas movie. Now excuse me while I watch VHS reruns of Jingle All The Way for the next 45 days, while you re-read this review in Gordon Ramsay’s exasperated British voice.

Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and Instagram