Worth: $6.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Robbie Amell, Leighton Meester, Michael Hitchcock, Kathryn Greenwood, Veronika Slowikowska
Intro:
… a Yuletide torture chamber ...
BuzzFeed Studios, out of an apparent fear that Wattpad is dominating the conversation concerning “films that we have to acknowledge the existence of, despite all sensible objections”, have spent the last few years inflicting serious duds on the unsuspecting public. The aggressively sexist Book of Love, the watchable-if-you-can-look-past-the-dumpster-fire-characterisation Fall, the Twitter-thread horror flick Dear David; truly, there is no beginning to their talents. And now, they are looking to add to the deluge of holiday-themed rom-coms that flood through streaming services every year like a tidal wave of regurgitated eggnog. And yet said wave must be more palatable than whatever fresh hell this is, because few things could be worse.
EXMas starts out with a whopper of a contrived plot, involving struggling game developer Graham (Robbie Amell) making a surprise visit to his parents’ house for Christmas… only to find his ex-fiancée Ali (Leighton Meester) already there, as she has kept close with his family well after she left him. Weird enough on its own, to the point of coming across like an r/AreTheStraightsOK post made flesh, but the extent to which it tries to turn this unholy stress test on Graham’s part into some kind of positive arrangement, strongarming him into the typical ‘family comes first’ mantra, is immensely frustrating to sit through.
It’s the kind of romantic coupling where you truly want to see them end up together by the end, but only because that would mean they don’t end up inflicting their hateful personalities on anyone else. Ali is unironic Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss, and Graham is almost cartoonishly vindictive, but the story is framed in such a way that it clearly thinks that only one of them needs to learn to be a better person. It’s highly suspicious how badly it tries to paint Graham as the sole bad guy, when everyone around him is so ear-scrapingly obnoxious that you’ll pray for Krampus to show up and put them all out of our misery.
The production values are woeful on top of that. DP Stephen Whitehead, who has too much experience with this kind of Hallmark-core, seemingly goes out of his way to find the least interesting ways to film every scene, while the soundtrack is so stock in its rote remixing of old Christmas jingles that you half-expect to hear an AudioJungle watermark. The diabetic content is bad enough on its own, insisting on being cheery about a setup that would be the basis for a thriller if the genders were reversed, but the wrapping can’t even stand up to decent scrutiny.
EXmas is a threadbare plastic Christmas tree that BuzzFeed desperately tries to convince is suitable for public display, handwaving the putrid stench of rot and bad ideas as ‘holiday aroma’. It is a Yuletide torture chamber that makes genital degloving via sharpened candy cane seem like a mercifully brief alternative, despite its 90-minute-or-so runtime. It’s a feel-bad holiday movie, but not in the fun way like Bad Santa or Christmas Vacation, and even for those with an innate fascination for these kinds of productions, it’s damn-near impossible to recommend this to anyone capable of sentience.
