The New Holiday Film Critique – The Streaming Giant’s Latest Holiday Romantic Comedy Falls Flat.

Without wanting to sound like a holiday cynic, one must bemoan the premature arrival of Christmas movies prior to the Thanksgiving holiday. While the weather cools, it feels too soon to completely immerse in the platform’s yearly buffet of low-cost festive entertainment.

Similar to US candy that no longer include real chocolate, the service’s holiday movies are relied upon for their style of badness. They provide predictable elements – nostalgic casting, low budgets, artificial winter scenes, and absurd premises. At worst, these films are unmemorable disasters; in the best scenarios, they are lighthearted distractions.

The new Netflix film, the latest holiday concoction, disappears into the vast middle of the forgettable spectrum. Directed by the filmmaker, who previously previous romantic comedy was so disposable, this movie goes down like cheap bubbly – fittingly lackluster and context-dependent.

It begins with what looks like an AI-generated ad for supermarket sparkling wine. This ad is actually the pitch of the main character, portrayed by Minka Kelly, to her colleagues at the Roth Group. The protagonist is the stereotypical image of a career woman – underestimated, phone-obsessed, and ambitious to the harm of her personal life. When her superior dispatches her to France to finalize an acquisition over the holidays, her sister insists she spend an evening in Paris to enjoy life.

Naturally, Paris is the ideal location to wrest one away from Google Maps, despite Paris is covered in unconvincing digital snowfall. In an absurdly cutesy bookshop, Sydney has a charming encounter with Henri Cassell, and he distracts her from her device. As demanded by rom-com conventions, she initially resists this perfect man for silly reasons.

Just as predictable are the movie mechanics that unfold at sudden shifts, reflecting the turning of aging champagne bottles in the vaults of the family vineyard. The twist? The love interest is the heir to the estate, reluctant to manage it and bitter toward his father for putting it up for sale. In perhaps the movie’s most salient contribution to the genre, he is extremely judgmental of private equity. The conflict? Sydney truly thinks she’s not stripping the ancestral business for profit, vying against three caricatures: a stern Frenchwoman, a rigid German, and an out-of-touch wealthy man.

The development? Sydney’s shady colleague Ryan appears unannounced. The core? The two leads look yearningly at one another in festive sleepwear, across a huge divide in financial perspective.

The upside and downside is that nothing here lingers beyond a short-lived thrill on an empty stomach. There’s a lack of real absorbent filler – the lead actress, most famous for her role in Friday Night Lights, gives a strictly serviceable performance, all sweet surfaces and gestures of care, almost motherly than love interest material. Tom Wozniczka offers just the right amount of French charm with mild self-torture and little else. The tricks are not amusing, the romance is harmless, and the ending is predictable.

Despite its philosophizing on the luxury of sparkling wine, no one is pretending it is anything other than a mainstream product. The things to hate are the very reasons some enjoy it. It’s fair to say a critic’s feelings about it a champagne problem.

• Champagne Problems is now available on Netflix.