Think of the most unimaginative, boring Christmas present you’ve ever been given – a pair of acrylic socks, for instance, or one of those suffocatingly perfumed talcum powders you can only buy in petrol stations. Now imagine the spirit of that gift transformed into a holiday-themed British feature film, and you’ll be close to approximating the dull drippiness that is 3 Wishes for Christmas. It’s got all the personality of a supermarket gift voucher. The only saving grace is that lead actor Christine During is sufficiently competent to make the insipid, sub-large language model dialogue sound moderately credible. Sadly, the same can’t be said for the rest of the cast, who seem to have been thrown to the wolves by incompetent direction and find themselves sometimes literally thrashing around, as if being torn limb from limb.
During plays Tessa, who writes an agony column for a magazine, although that bit of biography barely figures – which is quite typical of the script, a compilation of pointless plot points and stale tropes stolen from other Christmas-themed movies and literature. Thus Tessa splits up with her boring finance-bro boyfriend in a not early enough scene, decides to spend the holiday with her insufferably pert best friend Fiona (Katie Sheridan), and has a meet-cute en route with a good-looking but rude guy who turns out to be Fiona’s brother Sam (Jacob Anderton). Naturally they will fall in love, quarrel again and then … well, no spoilers. But it is a romcom.
One could list all the film’s shortcomings, but that would be like pulling wings off a fairly harmless moth. It feels as if it’s been designed for romance-loving pre-adolescents who aren’t quite old enough to watch the Bridget Jones movies, and while there are plenty of better things you could show such a demographic, this is at least only boring and not necessarily offensive.
● 3 Wishes for Christmas is in UK cinemas from 21 November.
