If you were to pour the movies Harvey, The Sixth Sense, Ghost, An Affair to Remember and Nuts into a blender and mix on the highest speed, you just may end up with the movie Last Christmas, one of the worst Christmas movies ever made.
Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) directed this dreck featuring Game Of Thrones‘ Emilia Clarke and Crazy Rich Asians‘ Henry Golding.
Written by two-time Oscar winner Emma Thompson (Howard’s End and Sense and Sensibility) the film, which may earn Thompson a Razzie nomination, tries to cash in on what movie studios think audiences want; movies based on dead (or living, if you include Elton John) singers’ music catalogues. In this case the late George Michael, (whose song, Last Christmas, is one of the better holiday songs of all time), is the chosen one.
The movie revolves around Kate (Clarke), or Katerina, if you call her by the name her mother (played by Emma Thompson) and father prefer, a complete mental mess.
The movie opens circa 1999 with a children’s choir in Yugoslavia performing, little Kate, front and center, but doing a dreadful job of singing, even though it is her passion.
Fast forward about 20 years and she is in London, homeless, crashing on couches of friends (until she gets thrown out, once for frying a salt water fish by dropping the hair dryer in the tank), or the beds of hook-ups, who happen have girlfriends, unbeknownst to her. She works in a Christmas Tree-like gift shop, (always dressed up as an elf), owned by a Chinese lady (the always great Michelle Yeoh wasted in this film).
Out of nowhere, literally, out pops Tom, (Golding). Has Kate finally found true love? He shows her around London; the city’s smallest alley, a tiny but quaint and hidden public garden, and the like.
Kate actually has had a heart transplant, yet walks around London drinking as much alcohol as she can. Anyone in real life that did that would be locked up in an insane asylum.
The film doesn’t even feature any good George Michael songs other than Last Christmas. You’d think for comedy sake the song I Want Your Sex would have been thrown into the mix. But, alas, instead, we have dick jokes. And Kate who uses the song She Drives Me Crazy, from the Fine Young Cannibals, as her ring tone on her phone.
If there was ever a case for a movie that should have been allowed to be shown exclusively on the Hallmark Channel, Last Christmas is it. So saccharine, so preposterous, so awful, the film without its two main stars, Clarke and Golding, and Thompson, (who does a Yugoslavian accent, and has bad hair, teeth and clothes), the film would deserve an F.
Thompson’s Petra actually saves the film from being completely unwatchable. The best line in the movie is uttered by her and involves the words “lesbian pudding.” For that alone, the movie is worth a look if you are wide awake at 3am some night and there is nothing else to watch. Shelling out any amount of money on this film is strongly discouraged.
Grade: D-
Last Christmas Review by Tim Nasson
