For the first time this season, Hallmark is sending us overseas. Jolly Good Christmas takes place in London, though we don’t see a ton of the London sights. It’s mostly just stores.
David (Will Kemp) is trying to find the perfect Christmas present for his girlfriend, Charlotte (Sophie Hopkins). While browsing her favorite store, he bumps into Anji (Reshma Shetty), a personal shopper. Anji prides herself on finding the perfect gift for her clients. Maybe Anji can help David with his problem.
While both Shetty and Kemp are both good actors, Jolly Good Christmas doesn’t really give them good material to work with. A majority of the time they are walking around a store or Anji is quizzing him about Charlotte’s tastes. Both of the characters are about as interesting as cardboard. And not even like good looking cardboard cutout cardboard. A plain old empty cardboard box. That is what David and Anji are. I’m not even sure why they like themselves much less each other.
Jolly Good Christmas feels like a movie where the writer kept adding things to the characters instead of making them fully fleshed out human beings to begin with. Anji is a personal shopper but she’s not really all that good at it but she’s good enough to be writing a book about it but she lied about the first time she bought someone “the perfect gift.” David is an architect but he misses the one and only time his client has time to meet with him so he has to sneak into a party to try to meet him but his boss is at the party and, oh yeah, his boss is the father of his girlfriend so now she’s mad at him for some dumb reason. It’s almost like the writer took an improv course before writing this thing.
Don’t bother wasting your time here. This is probably one of the most boring Christmas movies I have watched in a long time.