I'm secular but usually get into the holiday spirit just out of habit (my family and several friends celebrate Xmas, and hey, there's no work on the 25th), so I figured why not watch a dramedy with Patrick Stewart?
The movie is not terrible. The ending ties characters from different elevators together, so that's a plus. If anything good can be said about the film, it's that you dislike most of the characters less by the end, even the two who were written to be the most unlikable (played by Margaret Clunie and Roxanne Cook). Christmas Eve is a "White Christmas" in more ways than one: outside it's snowy, and 95% of the actors are white (which is almost demographically impossible for 6 random elevators in NYC). The token black dude plays a semi-imbecile (sembecile?) who figures it wouldn't be in the holiday spirit to urinate when trapped in an elevator. The token Hispanic dude is the one who causes the power outage in the first 5 minutes thanks to his Virgin Mary statuette dropping off the dashboard of his van (I am not making that up). Patrick Stewart enjoyed his role as a Scroogy billionaire a little too much, perhaps due to his off-screen socialist leanings.
The cardinal sin (no pun intended) of Christmas Eve is the sick patient demanding that the atheist/agnostic physician pray for her. As someone who knows many physicians: Please, if you are religious, don't cow a secular doctor into this even if you have a poor prognosis and are trapped in an elevator. While it shouldn't've surprised me that the Virgin Mary statuette was also part of the ending (and was the subliminal instigator of events), I was nonetheless hoping for a little less religious silliness. Bill O'Reilly would probably endorse this flick as part of his waging war against the theoretical War on Xmas, and for that reason and those stated above, I will not endorse this flick (at risk of being shunned as a Grinch).
The movie is not terrible. The ending ties characters from different elevators together, so that's a plus. If anything good can be said about the film, it's that you dislike most of the characters less by the end, even the two who were written to be the most unlikable (played by Margaret Clunie and Roxanne Cook). Christmas Eve is a "White Christmas" in more ways than one: outside it's snowy, and 95% of the actors are white (which is almost demographically impossible for 6 random elevators in NYC). The token black dude plays a semi-imbecile (sembecile?) who figures it wouldn't be in the holiday spirit to urinate when trapped in an elevator. The token Hispanic dude is the one who causes the power outage in the first 5 minutes thanks to his Virgin Mary statuette dropping off the dashboard of his van (I am not making that up). Patrick Stewart enjoyed his role as a Scroogy billionaire a little too much, perhaps due to his off-screen socialist leanings.
The cardinal sin (no pun intended) of Christmas Eve is the sick patient demanding that the atheist/agnostic physician pray for her. As someone who knows many physicians: Please, if you are religious, don't cow a secular doctor into this even if you have a poor prognosis and are trapped in an elevator. While it shouldn't've surprised me that the Virgin Mary statuette was also part of the ending (and was the subliminal instigator of events), I was nonetheless hoping for a little less religious silliness. Bill O'Reilly would probably endorse this flick as part of his waging war against the theoretical War on Xmas, and for that reason and those stated above, I will not endorse this flick (at risk of being shunned as a Grinch).