Candace Maxwell

(On TV, December 2022) Either I haven’t been paying attention, Canadian rights weren’t available, or BET didn’t churn out as many new BET+ original Christmas movies this year. The only one I saw on the schedule was The Christmas Clapback, and it’s actually not too bad. Of course, it’s a straight-to-TV Christmas movie, so its standards are low. This one forgoes (well, only by two thirds) the overused “girl goes back to hometown” cliché to dwell on family reunification subplots, loosely linked together by three sisters having a baking competition for a visiting influencer. The influencer angle is lame, sure, but the film is on much firmer ground when it comes to the three sisters, their ongoing rivalries and individual subplots. Director Robin Givens’s filmography is shaky so far, but she seems more at ease here than in her previous outings. It helps that the three lead actresses (Nadine Ellis, Porscha Coleman, and Candace Maxwell) look good and do well—the film can’t be good without them being compelling. As The Christmas Clapback develops, it turns out that it’s not that original—the subplots are a blend of clichés that make this a romantic comedy blended with food/family comedy in a Christmas wrapping. Points for the mixture, I guess, even if all the ingredients are very familiar. The dialogue is not that good but not terrible either. By the end, The Christmas Clapback is… fine, I guess. Better than it could have been, not quite good enough to make a strong impression. In the subgenre of made-for-TV Christmas movie, this is called a solid hit.