Christmas Karma (PG, 118 mins)
Verdict: It will empty cinemas quicker than an outbreak of dysentery
ONE STAR
Should you be passing Westminster Abbey any time soon, listen out for a whirring sound. It won’t be the construction crews working in Parliament Square. It will be Charles Dickens turning in his grave, having just seen Christmas Karma.
A Bollywood-inspired, musical adaptation of Dickens’s 1843 story A Christmas Carol, set in modern-day London, features Danny Dyer as a singing cabbie, not to mention Hugh Bonneville as Jacob Marley and Boy George as the Ghost of Christmas Future.
The film’s one impressive achievement is to empty cinemas quicker than an outbreak of dysentery.
Scarcely able to believe how ghastly it was after last week’s screening with fellow critics in London, on Tuesday afternoon I went to the Odeon in Hereford to endure it again.
Not since another of Dickens’s creations, Oliver Twist, has anyone presented themselves for seconds with such quaking apprehension.
The first time, I didn’t know what was in store. I even hoped the film – written and directed by Gurinder Chadha, who made the 2002 charmer Bend It Like Beckham – might be rather fun.
Should you be passing Westminster Abbey any time soon, listen out for a whirring sound. It won’t be the construction crews working in Parliament Square. It will be Charles Dickens turning in his grave, having just seen Christmas Karma
A Bollywood-inspired, musical adaptation of Dickens’s 1843 story A Christmas Carol, set in modern-day London, features Hugh Bonneville as Jacob Marley (pictured)
The second time, by contrast, I felt like a man about to undergo root canal surgery without anaesthetic. Not even a bag of Revels, enough to get me through most cinematic ordeals, was any comfort.
Yet with Ebenezer Scrooge-like misanthropy I didn’t warn the few others in the audience, just sat back in my £18.95 premier seat and waited for them to reach their own verdicts, which they duly did.
I counted seven people in the auditorium at the start but only three, myself included, at the blessed end.
Christmas Karma’s version of Scrooge is first-generation Indian immigrant Eshaan Sood, a scowling, mean-spirited, self-made founder of a financial services company called Marley & Sood who treats his employees, and everyone else, like dirt.
He is played by Kunal Nayaar, best-known for playing Raj in the US sitcom The Big Bang Theory.
There was certainly a big bang when Christmas Karma went on general release last Friday and critics opened fire. Spectacularly dreadful reviews included a short one of my own. Anointing it with one star out of five, I wrote that it deserves to be haunted for the rest of time by the ghost of good films past.
For the man from the Telegraph, it merited no stars. It was, he suggested, among the ‘worst things to happen to Christmas since King Herod’. Reviewing it honestly, he added, felt like ‘kicking Tiny Tim down a fire escape’. For the Guardian, Chadha’s movie was ‘leaden, unconvincingly acted and about as welcome as a dead rat in the eggnog’.
Of course, nobody sets out to make a terrible film. Giving A Christmas Carol an Anglo-Indian makeover, with songs, must once have seemed like an altogether splendid idea, not only to Chadha but also those who funded her project.
The Ghost of Christmas Future is played by a manifestly ill-at-ease Boy George (left), who looks faintly perplexed as if he’s been told that the party was fancy-dress when it wasn’t
The film’s one impressive achievement is to empty cinemas quicker than an outbreak of dysentery
The producers, incidentally, include Trudie Styler, who also has a cameo as a woman collecting for charity, duly sent packing by nasty Mr Sood.
On the subject of being sent packing, Christmas Karma enabled Chadha to delve into her own past, having grown up in Kenya before relocating to the UK. Mr Sood is one of more than 28,000 Ugandan Asians who arrived in Britain after being expelled by President Idi Amin in 1972.
He is forced to reflect on his happy childhood in Africa, and his traumatically abrupt relocation to a cold country smelling of boiled cabbage, by the Ghost of Christmas Past – played quite inexplicably, by Eva Longoria of Desperate Housewives fame, as a Mexican spirit from the Day of the Dead.
Maybe there are the seeds of something profound in the flashbacks to Uganda, and to the Sood family’s arrival at Heathrow, where they are greeted by placard-waving anti-immigration demonstrators.
But there are so many screeching misjudgments in Christmas Karma that its flirtation with racism, assimilation and anything else that might be thought to strengthen the narrative feels like an accident, as if a tasty-looking chipolata has somehow ended up in a bowl of over-cooked sprouts.
Moreover, hard as the script tries to make sense of the fact that its Scrooge character is a Hindu who doesn’t drink alcohol or eat meat or indeed celebrate Christmas, it fails.
Scarcely able to believe how ghastly it was after last week’s screening with fellow critics in London, on Tuesday afternoon I went to the Odeon in Hereford to endure it again
The first time, I didn’t know what was in store. I even hoped the film – written and directed by Gurinder Chadha (pictured), who made the 2002 charmer Bend It Like Beckham – might be fun
The film is only a minute or two old when Danny Dyer at the wheel of his black cab on Christmas Eve bursts into the title song, its lyrics not worthy of Cole Porter or even a Billingsgate porter: ‘Taxi wheels spin round and round again/ Common ground gets lost and found again/ Showing what comes round and round again’. Righto.
Our hope that things can only get better lasts no longer than it takes Dyer’s cheery cabbie Colin to realise that his passenger, Mr Sood, is an ineffable misery, so miserable that one of his minions back in the office, bursting into rap, sings that ‘he’s got a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp’.
So, by this point, has much of the audience, for the awful realisation has now dawned that Christmas Karma is likely to get much, much worse.
It’s hard to decide what the film’s most gobsmackingly, cringe-inducingly, ill-conceived moment is, given the stiff competition. It might well be the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Future, played by a manifestly ill-at-ease Boy George. He sports a goatee and a tattered black robe, and looks faintly perplexed as if he’s been told that the party was fancy-dress when it wasn’t, and must perforce spend the rest of the evening as a crow.
Maybe the perplexed air is more a look of bemusement, as George reflects that his career has taken him from Karma Chameleon to Christmas Karma.
The other three ghosts could also be forgiven for wondering what on earth made them sign up. As Marley, Mr Sood’s long-dead business partner, Bonneville is rendered in exceedingly weird CGI. Then there’s Longoria in her bizarre Day of the Dead garb and, as the Ghost of Christmas Present, the Broadway star Billy Porter in a lavish green gown and matching eyeshadow, like something from a nightmare, which in fairness I suppose he is.
Anyway, if you know the story (and if you don’t I recommend that 1992 classic The Muppet Christmas Carol, superior to this nonsense by a factor of several thousand) you’ll know the impact of all these apparitions.
Mr Sood sees the error of his ways and turns into the soul of generosity, rewarding his loyal clerk, Bob Cratchit (Leo Suter), winning over Mrs Cratchit (Pixie Lott), and saving the life of their disabled son Tim.
The apparently dirt-poor Cratchits, by the way, live in one of those multi-coloured houses in Notting Hill that probably cost about £3million and are a fortune even to rent.
Also, no self-respecting skinflint like Mr Sood would ever get into a black cab when there are Ubers knocking around. Even in the detail, Christmas Karma gets things crashingly wrong, and let’s not get started on the mid-November release date.
The upside of that is that it will surely be forgotten by the time the festive season gets properly underway, except insofar as it deserves to be immortalised, along with 1964’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (another bad idea), as one of the worst Christmas films of all time.
