The Perfect Holiday (2007)

(On TV, December 2022) In the very special realm of Christmas movies, The Perfect Holiday is better than most, and yet a substandard film in general. It does boast of an order-of-magnitude bigger budget than most of the straight-to-Hallmark stuff, and that shows in the calibre of the actors featured here—Queen Latifah and Terrence Howard as sort-of-narrators of a framing device, plus Gabrielle Union and Morris Chestnut as the film’s true leads, as well as notables such as Faizon Love, Katt Williams and Rachel True in smaller roles. The script is slightly more ambitious as well, with a tangled web of relationships and professional ambitions (in music, alas—a field where luck reigns supreme except in movie depictions of the music industry). It was even a theatrical release, although it flopped upon release and that explains why you probably never heard of it. If you, by mid-December, are burnt out by the slew of repetitive Christmas movies that seem to take over TV channels, then The Perfect Holiday will feel like a slight breath of fresh air. It tries to do a little bit more, it reuses a formula but not the same formula, and while Lance Rivera’s direction isn’t particularly notable, he’s working with much better crew than most Christmas films. I enjoyed watching the film for the wrong reasons: I’ve been a fan of Gabrielle Union for the past twenty years, and it had been a while since I last saw her in a substantial role, so this was a small treat even if I’ll be the first to say that her role could have been much, much better. On the larger scale for Christmas films, The Perfect Holiday ranks as “slightly better than innocuous,” which is not terrible but shouldn’t mean a must-see either… especially if it’s anytime from December 27 to December 7.