The music of George Michael and Wham! is hauled out on to the soundtrack of this mouldy tangerine of a movie with about the same level of care and sensitivity that you might find on the festive mixtape at a motorway service station. Say what you will about Yesterday, but at least it revered the music it co-opted. Here, we have a central character, Kate (Emilia Clarke), who has a George Michael sticker on her suitcase but a relationship with his music that is never explored.
The film, directed by Paul Feig and written by Emma Thompson, Greg Wise and Bryony Kimmings, is full of unsatisfying dead ends and seems more preoccupied with scoring worthy points than it is with tying together the story. Kate, formerly a talented singer, works as an elf in a year-round Christmas emporium and has lost her direction. Then a chance encounter with mysterious handsome stranger Tom (Henry Golding) jolts her out of her self-pity and self-destruction. But Tom is maddeningly elusive and, he gently explains, probably not great boyfriend material. Even so, Kate is sufficiently bolstered to pull on her elf boots and put on a talent show (surely the laziest of all Christmas film devices). It seems fitting at this point to use one of the hoariest of film criticism cliches and say that this was a film that lingered long after I left the cinema. In this case, it lingered in the form of a tension headache caused by 103 minutes of mortified wincing.
