Reviewing this perky modern musical take on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with any degree of honesty feels like kicking Tiny Tim down a fire escape. Christmas Karma is a film made with the best intentions by some lovely human beings, but which keeps finding new and spine-twistingly embarrassing ways to fall on its face.
The recipient of The Telegraph’s first zero-star film review since Cats in 2019 hails from the same school of indigestible seasonal tat as Nativity 3: Dude, Where’s My Donkey? It is among the worst things to happen to Christmas since King Herod.
Its writer and director is Gurinder Chadha, who almost – but doesn’t – gets a zero-stars lifetime pass for early works such as Bhaji on the Beach and Bend it Like Beckham, which expanded the scope of British cinema in 1990s and 2000s.
Like those films, Christmas Karma draws on Chadha’s Indian heritage: its Scrooge figure, played by a perpetually confused-looking Kunal Nayyar from The Big Bang Theory, is called Mr Sood.
This pinstriped misanthrope came to the UK following Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s south Asian population in 1972, though having capably feathered his own nest in the years since, he’s now intent on pulling up the ladder behind him: no more refugees, the country’s full.
Of course three spirits arrive to show him the error of his ways, heralded by Sood’s late partner Marley, who takes the genuinely blood-curdling form of a CGI Hugh Bonneville. The casting here baffles relentlessly: the ghosts are played respectively by Eva Longoria (in inexplicable Day of the Dead make-up that renders her unrecognisable), the Broadway star Billy Porter and Boy George – whose bulky black shroud, when shot on the pavement in broad daylight, makes him look like he’s been left out for the bin men.
The ghosts are played (left to right) by Eva Longoria, the Broadway star Billy Porter, and Boy George – True Brit Entertainment
“Eclectic” would also be a nice way to describe the songs, which were written variously by Gary Barlow, Shaznay Lewis of All Saints and her producer Ben Cullum, Nitin Sawhney and Panjabi MC. None could be described as new festive classics, though the bhangra version of We Wish You a Merry Christmas isn’t bad, and there is a primally jaw-dropping moment when the first verse of the title ballad is belted out by an AutoTuned Danny Dyer from the driver’s seat of a London taxi.
But the staging and performances are wobbly in the extreme: during many of the musical numbers you sense nobody knows where to look, or what to do with their hands. When Tiny Tim croakingly toasts the NHS over Christmas lunch (never mind that he has to travel to Switzerland for private treatment for an unspecified illness), my toes almost curled into shopping-trolley wheels. It is like watching British cinema undergo a deathbed hallucination.
In cinemas from Nov 14
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