This is the first year that I noticed a Christmas movie on the Roku channel. As usual, I didn’t do a lot of research before watching it so I knew nothing about Another Christmas before tuning in. I wish I knew less about it now.

Kelly (Sheena Faust) is an elementary school teacher alongside her friend, Tyler (Jimmy Willis III). Just before Christmas, Kelly gets a text from her ex-boyfriend (and Tyler’s best friend), Andrew (Malik Brazile). The two had parted on bad terms and Kelly is not willing to risk her heart again. But when Andrew comes home for the holidays, things just might change.

Another Christmas is a bad movie. Not a boring one, a bad one. And there are a lot of reasons why. First off, there are way, way too many characters. The movie begins by introducing each character or character pairing separately. It makes it very difficult to understand how the characters relate to each other. Instead of getting like five scenes that have nothing to do with each other, introduce the characters by having each of them come home for Christmas and we first meet them as they greet their family and friends. Or have a bunch of them meet up at a bar or restaurant or something. We, the audience, need something to bind these characters together and the movie doesn’t give us that.

Second, this is writer/director Stacie Davis’s first film as a director and it shows. There are a lot of strange shots where someone’s arm is in front of the camera and the audio echoes like they are in a tin can and the actors aren’t given direction so they just stand in one spot to talk to each other. It feels more like a movie a bunch of friends got together to make than a professional production. Davis only has one other script under her belt, Christmas in Carolina, which released in 2020. I’m not sure if Carolina suffers the same issue but the writing in Another Christmas comes off as if Davis has never held a conversation or even overheard someone talking. The sad thing is that I think this could have been a good script if it had gone through a couple more drafts and had some outside proofreaders.

Finally, give us an actual ending. This movie ended so abruptly that I actually had to rewind it and watch it again to make sure I didn’t miss something. I’m going to tell you the ending because there isn’t anything that it spoils. Camilla and Maison are a married couple having problems. The movie ends with Maison giving Camilla the keys to a Bermuda vacation house. She squeals excitedly, hugs him, and CREDITS. I have never seen a more jarring ending in my life. At no point do the two of them talk about wanting to own a vacation house in Bermuda. And Maison buying a whole house without talking to Camilla first doesn’t solve any of their problems. if anything, it’ll cause more problems. But we don’t get to know about any of that because the movie is DONE.

I really badly want some excellent Christmas movies that star people of color. The Liddle family series is a perfect example of a terrible movie that had great sequels and almost the entire cast is black. (I think there was a white neighbor in one of the movies.) All Another Christmas has to do is cut out part of the cast in order to focus on one or two of the couples and bump up the writing. I can’t recommend watching this movie but I am hopeful that something better is on the horizon.