Yesterday, a cat and a snomwan made my spirit soar. Today, I’m brought down to earth with a thud by 2016’s Operation: Christmas List. This one follows teenager Barney (Colton Gobbo) and his buddies as they sneak into a toy shop at night to try and get their hands on this year’s must-have toy. Things don’t go as planned as despicable euro-villain Forte (Brian Cook) and his crew of incompetent thieves show up to rob the place. It’s a decent idea, ripe with opportunity for some Home Alone-style thrills but, sadly, it’s done on the cheap, with lots of groan-inducing humour.
Crucially, most of the child actors, especially Gobbo, are pretty smug and punchable, with dialogue written by adults who don’t get how real kids actually act or talk. Julia Pulo as geeky, brace-faced Iris is the standout and gets the most laughs by just being so appealingly weird. She’s captivatingly creepy and hilarious, a rare highlight in an otherwise shoddy film.
Barney is a fairly unlikeable lead and is actually a bit of a knob. He cons his pals to break into the store to get the toys, promising to pay for them, but he really just wants to nick them and sell them to pay for a bike his mum can’t afford and which he definitely doesn’t deserve. Of course he’ll learn some sort of Christmas lesson, but when the whole premise hinges on having us root for a lying thief, it’s a big ask.
Forte is a needlessly theatrical baddie whose grating accent sways wildly between Dutch, American and full-on Borat. There’s no explanation as to where this guy is from, why he needed to be foreign or why he talks like this. Accents = funny, I guess?
Director Justin G. Dyck’s film doesn’t look great either. The main toy shop location looks like an ugly stockroom kitted out with a few boxes of fake, naff toys that no self-respecting kid would ever want. The ‘must-have’ toy is also just a hideous pink teddy with no discernible unique selling point. It’s a metaphor for the whole film – zero thought has been put into making this special and it’s never going to be regarded as a Christmas classic.
I guess it helps to put yourself in the shoes of a child while watching this – it does raise the odd chuckle, especially when Iris is on screen. Scenes with bad guys getting hurt and humiliated are always kind of funny too, so I suppose children of a certain age might get a kick out of this.
Comments