The Holiday season is upon us, and so is the season of unoriginal Christmas-themed rom-coms. With an obvious attempt to disassociate myself from The Grinch, I would like to add that I am quite the sucker for films that embrace the Yuletide cheers. Originality is not the first thing I look for when it comes to Christmas Movies, although it does not hurt when something uniquely joyful wanders into our path at this time of the year — like 2019’s “Klaus” for instance. However, I can look past the obvious, the cliched, for the predictable comfort of a half-decent Christmas movie.
Having said that, there is a fine line that separates the familiar cheers from the absolute trites. And Netflix’s “The Merry Gentlemen” is too hackneyed to be taken seriously. Even with the leniency reserved for films that have more than three Christmas songs, and the leniency that the Holiday season demands of us, Peter Sullivan’s film is just not it. It is not the fact that the film strictly follows the formula that makes “The Merry Gentlemen” unpalatable, but it is the other fact that it fumbles at following the same formula.
We start with the immensely familiar premise where career-oriented women (‘City Girls’ as the film would like to call it) come back to their ancestral small-town homes and meet a blue-collar worker hunk, who will sweep the girl off her feet while showing the simple joys that life can bring. All this while embarking on a common project that would, one or way another, save the small town’s soul. Our heroine, Ashley (Britt Robertson) is supposedly a great dancer. Her performance in the dancing group “The Jingle Belles” is termed to be the USP of the production. But, as with showbiz, she is kicked out of the group for getting older every year.
The crisis forces her to go back to her hometown, the cozy setting of Sycamore Creek. There she meets the flannel-shirt-wearing handsome handyman, Luke (Chad Michael Murray). Luke has been helping Ashley’s parents maintain their bar. Luke’s efforts, however, are not enough to keep the business afloat. The script, written by Sullivan himself, Jeffrey Schenck, and Marla Sokoloff, had two obvious paths to take at this juncture. To make Ashley and Luke click, and to have the romancing duo save the local bar so that everyone can have a happy Christmas dinner.
“The Merry Gentlemen” takes the familiar paths, but it stumbles on the way. It rushes to follow its structure, as opposed to cherishing it. The holiday cheers are delivered fast, and half-heartedly. From the meet-cute, all of us know that Luke and Ashley need to be together. So, it’s no surprise when they do, but it is a mystery as to how. Luke and Ashley barely exchange a total of ten sentences together before Ashley asks Luke to join the project to save her parents’ bar. And what a project it is. Ashley feels the bar could do with a dancing show. So, she recruits Luke and a few more muscular guys, including her sister’s husband, to perform in a strip show. But, just to keep the show, and the film, family-friendly, the boys will only take their shirts off.
The ludicrousness does not lie in the idea itself as much as it does in the alacrity with which everyone, including Ashley’s parents, Ashley’s sister, The Bar’s landlord, all the townsfolk, and their dogs accepts the idea. Mind you, the burly performances from the boys (especially by Colt Prattes’ Troy and Maxwell Caulfield’s Danny) are perhaps the high points of the film.
Whereas, despite the individually passable performances, the double act of Chad Michael Murray and Britt Robertson as the romantic pair is tepid. Perhaps it is the ludicrous way their romance starts or the fact we cannot point to the exact time when their romance starts. The ‘rom’ in this ‘rom-com’ fizzles out pretty quickly. Peter Sullivan knows what he is gunning for with “The Merry Gentlemen.” We even see the film acknowledge its intention to match the standard set by ‘Hallmark.’ Alas, despite the channel’s penchant for banality, some of the better works of Hallmark should be preferred over this Netflix-Hallmark hybrid.
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