We are here to have a discussion about the nature and merits of the Christmas movie. However, before any progress can be made, there’s something we need to confront. It’s an old issue. You’re probably bored with it. But there’s no getting around this. Sorry. It might seem like pointless contrarian posturing, but it’s actually a very big deal, fundamental to the entire dilemma of the Christmas movie’s decline. It’s a question that has enraged the festive and delighted the edgy ever since 1988, and it is this: Is Die Hard a Christmas film?
If you’ve not seen Die Hard, all you need to know is that it’s an action movie starring Bruce Willis. He plays a grumpy cop who spends his time beating up terrorists and delivering stoic one-liners. It also happens to be set on Christmas Eve.
It’s clear why there’s controversy surrounding Die Hard’s place in the Christmas pantheon. Yes, it’s the night before Christmas. Yes, there’s a festive tune every now and again. But it’s also dark, obscene, and incredibly violent. Moving straight onto Die Hard after an afternoon of Nativity and The Muppet Christmas Carol would incur more than a degree of tonal whiplash.
What’s interesting about Die Hard’s rejection from Christmas canon, though, is that it demonstrates that just because a film is set at Christmas, that is not necessarily enough for it to count as a Christmas film. At best, something that is set in December but eschews the conventions that define the bulk of the genre might get by as technically a Christmas film. Love Actually is a Christmas film, but Gremlins is technically a Christmas film, in the same way that Harry Styles was technically a contender on The X Factor, but is somewhat more notable for his dress-wearing war on the patriarchy.
I humbly suggest that the Christmas genre’s refusal to embrace Die Hard, and other films like it, is emblematic of why it is fizzling away into critical disdain and cinematic obscurity.
Of course, every genre is bound by a series of rules, tropes, and motifs. But none are more rigid nor relentlessly smothering than the Christmas movie. This genre is creepily obsessed with its own purity. That might sound dramatic, but consider the contention over whether a film literally set over the night of Christmas Eve is allowed to count as a Christmas movie. This is no small skirmish – Bruce Willis himself offered his own perspective in 2018 and even he doesn’t think it’s a Christmas movie. However, the guys who made the Titanic didn’t think it would sink. Essentially, this changes nothing.
The point is that even though people relate to and celebrate Christmas in a huge variety of ways, the shape that a film must take before it can count as legitimately Christmassy is utterly inflexible. It must be cutesy. It must be earnest. It must be sweet, sentimental and family-friendly. The film must rest on the premise that it is Christmassy and magical and any character that doesn’t get that at the start of the film is sure as hell going to agree by the end. In 2015, The Night Before sold itself as a raunchy alternative to the sickly classics, but ended up deferring to that same schmaltzy Christmas romance once the final act kicked in. Why? Because it was marketed as a Christmas movie, so, a Christmas movie it must be.
Insistence on these twinkling, mawkish qualities is in some ways more important to Christmas movies than it actually involving Christmas. Let’s compare The Holiday with the movie Filth. Both take place over the same approximate time period (just before Christmas through to the New Year). However, the former is a rom-com about a Brit and an American who swap houses and find love in idyllic but unlikely circumstances, whilst the latter concerns a corrupt cop whose mental illness and alcoholism are slowly destroying his life. Significant parts of Filth actually take place on Christmas Day – this is not true of The Holiday, but guess which one turns up on more lists of the Top Ten Best Christmas Films of All Time? (It’s not the one with the manic substance abuser).
Of course, The Holiday was always going to have a wider audience appeal than Filth, but the point still stands that the only thing that seems to separate a lot of ‘technical’ Christmas films from ‘real’ Christmas films is an interminable drip feed of hokum and whimsy. In Bruges is set at Christmas, and yes – its protagonists are amoral assassins – but its narrative themes of redemption and sacrifice have far more in common with the traditional spirit of Christmas than Home Alone, the story of a psychopathic infant who creates a series of cruel and unusual traps to inflict grievous bodily harm on his home invaders. Colin Frissell from Love Actually is basically an incel who flies to the other side of the planet for the sole purpose of getting some action. Yet the syrupy tone makes him seem positively old-fashioned. His horniness manifests in a wholesome, adolescent way that is relatable to the kinds of people who shop at Waitrose.
The result of forcing everything into identical, sickly-sweet boxes, is that we’re watching the same film, or certainly the same very basic themes, over and over and over again, and we’re getting sick of it.
When Last Christmas (starring Emilia Clarke) came out last year, it was received poorly by critics. But watching it, you have to ask yourself – is this really that bad, or is it just the same movie we’ve already seen a million times already?
Is it really worse than Love Actually, whose female characters (with the eternal exception of Emma Thompson) are personality-less husks for the male characters to make bold, romantic gestures at? Is it really worse than The Holiday, which basically consists of Jude Law saying “bloody hell, I’m rather British” and flopping his hair about in a contrived appeal to American women who would rather be watching Hugh Grant anyway? Is it really worse than The Santa Clause, whose cloying orchestral score seems almost comically mismatched with its subject matter, a depressed man appearing to gaslight his son?
I’m not saying any of these films are awful, but an honest rewatch finds nostalgia doing much of the heavy lifting. The ideas they present must have been entertaining once upon a time, however now they are hackneyed and tired. The genre is in urgent need of some new blood – so this holiday season, help keep the spirit of Christmas alive, and watch Die Hard.
