Jodie Sweetin

(On Cable TV, December 2022) If you feel that I’m spending a lot of time justifying why I choose to watch some Christmas films, you’re not wrong—it doesn’t take a lot of perfunctory made-for-TV holiday movies to figure out that they’re made to be alike. Plotting is irrelevant, casting is usually a non-factor, production values are low and everything has the awkward, barely cinematic atmosphere of something done quick and cheap. So: what is it that distinguishes Merry Swissmas from others of the same ilk? Well, Jodie Sweetin stars in it, and she was one of the facets of Fuller House I liked best. So why not? It’s not as if those films are meant to be demanding after all. But star power only takes you so far, and Merry Swissmas’s clunky attempts to iterate on the usual formula aren’t any better. The big difference in plotting, as much as I can tell, is that our usual big-city career professional heroine goes back “home” not to a small American town, but to the inn that her mother manages in the Swiss Alps. But this international fillip aside (complete with “Swiss Christmas traditions” that may or may not be wildly exaggerated), there’s not a lot of difference here. Of course, she’ll meet an eligible bachelor and it’s not a minute’s worth of contemplation about whether she wants to slow down her jet-setting lifestyle that changes much. The “Swiss” atmosphere is made of stock footage and French-Canadian Laurentians locations dressed up in pseudo-European style. The rest of it isn’t much better—there’s a kid to cheer up, past wrongs to right, miscommunications to clarify and everything leads to a Christmas climax. Sweetin isn’t particularly good and neither is co-star Tim Rozon, but their performances barely matter in a film that would rather give you an overdose of Christmas clichés than build anything that could stand on its own. Fortunately, Christmas movies life Merry Swissmas fail gracefully: they may not be good, but they’re hard to hate. On the other hand, they do lead viewers to become selective about the ones they choose to watch.