With Danny DeVito on the poster, there certainly is intrigue when going into Peter Chelsom’s A Sudden Case of Christmas. However, his presence is the only redeeming factor of the worse than cookie-cutter holiday film.
To break the news of their divorce, the parents of ten-year-old Claire (Antonella Rose) take her to the Italian countryside to visit her grandfather, where they will all learn valuable lessons about family and the Christmas spirit, something never before seen in a holiday flick. To be in a film with your own daughter sprouts many questions for any actor, especially one where the gap in stardom between DeVito and his daughter Lucy (playing the mother) is so great that one can only use this film as a poor stunt for the both of them. In a world where so few stars leave the acting before the acting leaves them, it’s a shame to see DeVito following the crowd.
I’ll admit, it is quite the ambitious move to place a Christmas movie in the polar opposite setting of 99 percent other Christmas movies, but it was a level of ambition nobody asked for. Not only did nobody ask for it, nobody was charmed by it either. Assuming the entire film was not just a quick studio money grab, what the writers were thinking the people wanted from them is beyond me.
Trying to make a Christmas movie in the current day is hard enough, but trying to make one as unorthodox as this was a shot in the dark to put it kindly. To ask someone to watch this film over any known Holiday movie is like asking someone to celebrate Christmas in August. It’s not a trick question: Christmas in summer sucks.
While it could be worse, it could most definitely be better, which is the biggest downfall of the film. If I won’t remember it in a month, why watch it? If you’re going to watch A Sudden Case of Christmas, watch it soon, while Christmas is more than a month away, because God forbid you remember this movie during the actual holidays.
