Anything But Christmas (2012) starring Elaine Hendrix, Sergio Di Zio, Sean Michael Kyer, Christopher Lloyd, Gabrielle Rose, Jessica Harmon directed by Allan Harmon Movie Review

Anything But Christmas (2012)   2/52/52/52/52/5


Elaine Hendrix in Anything But Christmas (2012)

Christmas Needs Grace

John (Sergio Di Zio) really loves Grace (Sergio Di Zio) and her son Zachary (Sean Michael Kyer0 and he is thinking about proposing to her. The trouble is that it is Christmas and John doesn't do Christmas, in fact he hates Christmas, he hates Santa and it makes him suffer panic attacks. Fine when he was alone but Grace and Zachary love Christmas and want John to love it as much as they do. To make matters worse Grace wants this Christmas to include all the family including her sister and later husband's mother which just adds to John's stress levels.

"Anything But Christmas" is one of those movies which has the parts and characters for a chaotic Christmas farce. But it fails to shoe horn all those parts together into a genuinely entertaining Christmas movie with the whole clash of characters ending up to annoying. It is what lets it down because there is some genuinely amusing humour squeezed in the movie but it ends up coming across like a lot of angry people screaming in your ears.

So in a way "Anything But Christmas" is a bit like "Christmas Vacation" where we are meant to be amused by the chaos of Christmas and John being stuck in the middle of it with his phobia of Christmas. We are meant to like John who freaks when ever the C word is mentioned and feel for Grace because she has discovered something. We are meant to laugh because John's parents are cantankerous miseries and he has an ex lurking around who still fancies him. But the humour of it all is painfully slim and sometimes misguided and as I said when you have angry characters who moan at each other it is hard to warm to.

The most surprising thing of all this is that there are some familiar faces in the movie such as Elaine Hendrix and Christopher Lloyd but again their characters are so annoying that it is impossible to warm to them.

What this all boils down to is that "Anything But Christmas" has all the elements for a Christmas farce but they don't gel into a fun Christmas movie because the characters are all so annoying.

Tags: TV Christmas Movies, Christmas Movies


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