Directed By Michael Showalter

Starring – Michelle Pfeiffer, Denis Leary, Felicity Jones

The Plot – Claire (Pfeiffer) plans a special Christmas, but is forgotten by her family. When they realize that she’s missing, their holiday is at risk until she returns to give them the celebration they deserve.

Rated PG-13 for some drug use, sexual material and strong adult language.

Oh. What. Fun. – Official Trailer | Prime Video

POSITIVES

Despite an overly tedious execution that flounders many of the integrities of its deep-seeded messaging to the audience, the film at the very least effectively illustrates the endlessly thankless job that mothers frequently endure around the holidays, conveying insightful realities not only to the idea that they are the glue that holds the household traditions and festivities together, but also the selfless essence of dedication that deserves to be celebrated on its own irreplaceable value. While there’s many aspects to Claire’s characterization that challenges my empathizing of the character, Showalter’s direction visually conveys the maniacal mayhem that comes with suppressing so many clashing personalities under one roof, particularly with overriding editing techniques during side by side sequences where Claire is slaving over a hot stove, while everybody else snuggles in the comforts of a home that they’ve had very little influence keeping up, and with the movie articulating the eye-opening lack of focus that Christmas films have given to the backbone of these families, Showalter goes especially out of his way to conjure evidence in his overarching narrative, allowing faithful focus where it’s rightfully deserved, even at the balance of Claire’s own withering morality threatening to compromise such a noble intention. On top of this, while the filmmaking to the engagement is quite mundane and inescapably of streaming quality, the set designs do commit themselves effortlessly to the inescapable essence of the Christmas season, particularly with interior and exterior decoration that puts a majority of the film’s budget to tangibly interactive use. These aspects go a long way articulating the manically competitive side to commercialism between its neighborly characters, which loses sight of what the season is all about, but beyond that helps to enact the level of personal importance that the holiday plays to Claire’s somewhat disheveled mindset of family traditionalism, going bigger and bolder than anything or anyone in a movie featuring a rich assortment of charismatic personalities to its ensemble. Speaking of those familiar faces, everyone from Dominic Sessa, to Chloe Grace Moretz, to Jason Schwartzman, to even Danielle Brooks, makes their presence felt during scene-stealing instances of naturalized chemistry in this bickering family, but it’s definitely Michelle Pfeiffer’s stage to shine in the clutches of a character who physically wears the exhaustion of her family’s toll, and emotionally renders the isolated loneliness of the season at its very worst. With Pfeiffer’s piercing eyes able to convey her internalized disappointment and occasional anger towards Claire’s surrounding cohorts, it gives her turn an essence of instability that fuels motivations to her often illogical decision-making, in turn cementing what is easily Pfeiffer’s best work in decades in the newfound deviation towards comedy that definitely showcases a new side of our expectations towards her.

NEGATIVES

While the list of cherished holiday favorites feels limitless, there’s certainly just as many lumps of coal that make up the list of disappointingly inferior installments, with “Oh.What.Fun!” being a memorable addition to the latter, for the kinds of compromising mistakes and moral inconsistency that it makes to its own optimistic integrity. For starters, this is a screenplay that commits the three deadly sins against audience adoration, in that it’s illogically processed, shamelessly derivative, and so painfully unfunny that it feels like a shell of those better films that it constantly features, almost serving as a reminder that you could and should be watching superior Christmas movies that not only did it originally, but also played into the sentiments of the season, in order to elicit emotional layers beneath its hilarity. Part of the reason the film fails so incredibly at such intentions certainly stems from the development given to its characters, outlining a group of people so insufferably selfish and uninvesting that you find it difficult to empathize in a single one of them, but also in this inescapable wallowing to Claire’s narration that weighs heavily like a wet blanket on an already materialistic side to the movie’s holiday captivity. While I can wholeheartedly understand and even grieve for her displeasure with those surrounding her, it seems like even she fails to understand the true meaning of the season, by film’s end, featuring a strangely bewildering ending that feels fantastical instead of freeing, all the while taking her on a journey with these borrowed bits of scenes from Christmas movies such as “Planes, Trains & Automobiles” and “Home Alone”, which breed quite the allowance of audaciousness for Showalter even thinking that this film could breathe the same air as those timeless classics. On top of this, so many of the situational conflicts feel so artificially forced and illogical, on account of Claire’s own self-serving privilege, such as one instance where she parks deliberately in a towing zone, or another when she commits theft on Christmas Eve, while refusing to stand in a long line, and it feels like proof that Showalter has so little faith in the abundance of inter-pocketed family conflicts that he has to manufacture these moments that are entirely compromising to his protagonist’s approachable integrity, all featuring the kind of lasting stakes and impact as an upper class Karen losing her cardigan at the tennis court. On the subject of that aforementioned family dynamics, being that this is a short story adapted for feature length, there are far too many persisting subplots to make the transpiring of minutes feel anything other than arduous to audience integrity, but all of them bare so little wiggle room creatively to effectively evade predictability, the most of which feeling unaffected by the head of their household missing, without any semblance of urgency or guilt to make it the primary focus of these events that transpire like thoughts in the wind. In terms of technical components, Showalter and cinematographer Jim Frohna aren’t able to evade the artistic likeness of a Lifetime Television movie, featuring nothing in the way of challenging captures or creative transitions to at least charm audiences into feeling enamored by the presentation, and an occasionally credible score from Siddhartha Khosla going wasted by the film’s decision to sample outdated pop songs, such as both Talk Talk’s 1984 classic “It’s My Life”, as well as No Doubt’s 2003 version of the very same song. If this isn’t enough, the extensive ensemble go mostly wasted, on account of an underserved and blandly flat script imbedding these single note personality traits meant to serve as conflicts for each of these characters, with Denis Leary, Jason Schwartzman, and tragically even Felicity Jones being so severely underutilized that I forgot they were there, even when I’m looking them directly in their faces. Because we learn so little about them as characters beyond what the script trivializes them for, we never feel like we have a firm grasp on the air of their intentions feeling selfishly shallow or unintentionally naive, and considering the magnitude of star power casually dispersed in the movie’s favor, it really makes you wonder what attracted them to thankless roles so emotionally vapid of soulful presence.

OVERALL
“Oh.What.Fun!” might serve honorably as an eye-opening love-letter to those underappreciated mothers maintaining the holiday households, but it’s ultimately one lump of cluttered coal made calamitous, on account of selfishly shallow perspectives and agonizing wallowing that sacrifice the heartfelt sentiment of Showalter’s entailing. Despite Michelle Pfeiffer doing the heavy lifting in a film that doesn’t always have her character’s best intentions in mind, the film surrounding her efforts amounts to nothing more than an unfunny and untouching package best left unopened, proving at Amazon, you do in fact get what you pay for.

My Grade: 4.3 or F