Written by Luke Barnes
Summary
A child, played by Winslow Fegley, must overcome a sea of obstacles to get a Nintendo games console for Christmas.
This film took eighties nostalgia, which is already quite a tapped out well, and went too far with it. Though I enjoyed the sentiment of the film and thought a lot of its messages were good, I thought the film leant far too heavily into eighties nostalgia and showed us all the things we have seen before, and all too recently at that.
I could never hate this film as it features Neil Patrick Harris in a leading role. Harris is as terrific as always and manages to get a number of good jokes here. I particularly enjoyed the film’s final scene which I thought really hammered home the emotional message of the film, I thought during this scene Harris did a magnificent job of selling the emotion of the scene and turning something that could have felt quite overly sentimental into just poignant enough to resonate.
The laughs were quite sparse for me, like I said Harris has a few funny lines but outside of that the film is quite lacking with most of the jokes not landing. I found a lot of the side characters to be quite annoying and the video game violence subplot to be not only annoying but deeply caricature like of everyone involved, it was silly to include if they had nothing meaningful to say on it.
Overall, a very meh Christmas film that manages to sneak past average thanks to Neil Patrick Harris and a powerful emotional ending.
Pros.
Harris
The ending
A few funny jokes
Cons.
Annoying side characters
Far too reliant on eighties nostalgia
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Another Millennial Reviewer 