The Merry Gentlemen review – more forgettable festive filler from Netflix | Comedy films

TThe endless expansion of Netflix, still by far the most streamed of all streamers, has turned it into an ambitious one-stop shop for everyone, home to both the elegant and the flashy. This divide is never more apparent than at the end of the year, when the platform’s prestigious Oscar-focused fare is available alongside the cheesy Christmas movies, with the same restaurant offering both filet mignon and beef jerky.

Just last week, on the same day that Netflix released Jacques Audiard’s critically acclaimed Cannes-award-winning trans-musical drama Emilia Pérez, it also launched Hot Frosty, a film starring Lacey Chabert as a woman who falls for a snowman that comes to life comes. It’s part of the appeal, the crowds within, but again, this season has highlighted what the people are doing Real want to. Although Emilia Pérez failed to crack the top 10 most-watched films, Hot Frosty remains at number one (Audard’s Oscar-buzzed film is estimated to have entered 277,000 US households, compared to the more than 1 million that Christina Milian’s perfectly entertaining Christmas film reached this week for). Netflix reportedly paid $12 million to acquire Emilia Perez at Cannes, a sum that could essentially fund an entire season of micro-budget festive films.

So while viewers continue to shun the platform’s awards (last year’s Maestro, Nyad, Rustin, American Symphony, El Conde and May December were all disappointing), you can bet they’ll be drawn to this one’s junky Christmas offering week, the cheesy and not quite cheerful enough comedy The Merry Gentlemen. Normally you’d expect something more commercially focused to perform better, but the gap between the two ends of the streamer’s original content — from Hallmark to arthouse — feels wider than ever before.

There’s nothing distractingly bad about this one and there may be plenty of boxes ticked for undemanding Christmas movie completists, but due to the overcrowded space there’s nothing worth clicking on here either, not even the sight of Chad’s impressively maintained abs Michael Murray. The ex-One Tree Hill star, who recently played toy boy to Brooke Shields in Netflix’s summer rom-com Mother of the Bride, features them for a significant portion of the film, an attempt to liven up the formula with some sub- magical mike. theater.

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 crappy version of the Rockettes. She returns 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 devises a plan to raise money with an all-male and all-PG-rated stripper troupe (luckily, both her sister’s partner, the bartender, and her Uber driver all muscles too). If enough horny female locals buy tickets (the city doesn’t seem to have any gay residents), she might be able to save the day.

It’s the classic story 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 worst of these films (we only get one scene of her cooking with her mother), still preaches the same message. The potential rawness of the setup is handled with maximum restraint, and rather than even making light of the tensions that might arise from the increasingly puritanical world of small-town America handling a show built around female excitement, it is just a delivery service for someone else. city ​​girl meets small town romance (despite being a successful Broadway dancer, Ashley is of course also an accident-prone klutz in the presence of a man with a six-pack).

There are blinks and missed flashes of self-awareness (a character watches another Netflix Christmas movie, Murray’s lumberjack is referred to as a “Hallmark handyman”), but it’s mostly just autopilot fluff without enough charm or Christmas cheer 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 a protagonist, her romance with Murray too much cut-and-paste for us to care, and the journey of debt to victory far too much. easy to wake someone from an eggnog coma. The stakes here are too low and so is the entertainment value. I predict another hit.