After the unexpected delight of the Christmoose, a not-so-pleasant surprise follows with 2019’s Noelle, a big bucks Disney effort featuring Anna Kendrick as Santa’s daughter who must travel to sunny Phoenix, Arizona on a mission to find her brother Nick (Bill Hader) and Save Christmas. Plucky Kendrick, so full of peppy get-up-and-go seems a natural choice to play this part and I find she really builds on the energetic, high-spirited performance she gave in Trolls. I’ve been stuck in lockdown for close to a year with a three year old girl, so I am overly familiar with the exploits of the chirpy Princess Poppy of the Pop Trolls and happen to think that Kendrick is marvellous at this sort of thing. So, imagine my shock and horror in discovering that Noelle is a big, dull dud.
It's a rare family film that starts out with the distressing revelation that Santa Claus is dead and he won’t be coming back. This feels really misjudged, like couldn’t he just be retiring or something? Good luck explaining that to the kids. So, this is a story about Santa’s offspring trying to tackle the family business, but totally freaking out about it.
Hader, so usually the hilarious funny-voiced MVP in pretty much everything he’s in, is curiously muted here as angst-ridden Nick who, feeling the enormous pressure of filling dad’s boots, nips off to Arizona on ‘vacation’ and never comes back. So begins Noelle’s journey in what feels like a bland, soulless, laugh-free Elf rip-off with a predictable Hallmark romance plot needlessly tacked on. In fact, it’s pretty much Annie Claus… with a massive budget but a fraction of the fun.
It's mostly a curiously unfunny film, with so many jokes that miss the mark. A chorus line of singing elves that help narrate the story might have seemed a good idea on paper but is irritating and rubbish. Billy Eichner is Noelle’s boring tech expert cousin Gabriel who commands a lot of screen time and seems to be a commentary on the soullessness of letting the tech giants take over Christmas, but his segments are lame and humourless.
I can sort of see the point the film is making with Gabriel’s algorithm determining that there’s less than 3,000 ‘nice’ kids left in the world, hinting at the robotic callousness of the technology that seems to run the world. However, following a ‘Covid Christmas’ where online companies like Amazon effectively saved the day for millions, the message seems a bit muddled. Also, I’m watching this on Disney+ , an online streaming platform that used an algorithm to recommend this movie to me, so it’s a touch hypocritical.
There’s also a running joke that Noelle is not used to the Arizona sun and doesn’t know what to do with sunblock, so she eats it, then later she locks herself in a freezer for a bit. It’s not great.
The film does have an empowering Girl Power message – why the hell can’t a girl be Santa? But it’s a long, turgid journey to get to that point. Noelle hires a handsome but bland P.I. (Kingsley Ben-Adir) to find her brother, even though they quickly locate him just by googling some stuff. Then when they find Nick he’s now into new age stuff like meditation, yoga and mindfulness which isn’t exactly a laugh riot. Saying “namaste” a couple of times doesn’t really cut it at all.
The film is harmless, goofy nonsense, but a real wasted opportunity, never coming anywhere near Elf levels of madcap hilarity. It feels criminal that they got Kendrick, Hader and even Shirley MacLaine as a wise old elf and couldn’t come up with anything humorous for them to do. Kendrick is dependably game and gets to wear some fantastic festive outfits, but she’s poorly served by a pretty pants script from writer/director Marc Lawrence. What a shame.
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