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Christmas is a time of tables laid with lavish servings of turkey and lashings of cranberry sauce. Of timber heaving with fairy lights and baubles, with scores of presents gathered round like Victorian urchins warming themselves by a lit brazier. Of Hollywood encouraging you to take your shot with Keira Knightley. In different phrases, it’s a time of rampant consumerism. Sky Max’s The Heist Earlier than Christmas is one thing of a tonic, then: a Christmas film for the underserved market in underserved Christmases.
“How’s issues at residence, Mikey?” asks his headmaster, after Mikey (Bamber Todd) is caught, but once more, inflicting hassle at his Northern Irish major college. Issues aren’t nice. Single mom Patricia (Laura Donnelly) is struggling to place meals on the desk, whereas her youngest son, Sean (Joshua McLees), is clinging on to the final vestiges of childlike naivety. Their Christmas plans change into inextricably tousled with these of a financial institution robber (James Nesbitt), who’s on the lam in a Santa swimsuit, and Santa himself (Timothy Spall), who younger Mikey encounters laid up within the woods following an obvious sleigh crash. With each the police and Christmas Day closing in, what classes are going to be learnt by this uncommon quartet?
Whether or not it’s the McCallisters of House Alone, the Scrooges of, you recognize, all these Christmas Carol variations, and even It’s a Fantastic Life’s depressed banker, George Bailey, Christmas motion pictures typically depict the materially rich in want of non secular nourishment. The true that means of Christmas, they’re advised, isn’t in gift-giving or gorging, however in household, fraternity, and friendship. Right here, The Heist Earlier than Christmas is an attention-grabbing and worthwhile divergence. “Don’t you will have a phone?” Santa asks Mikey, telling him to name the police. “No,” Mikey replies, “you by no means introduced me one.” It’s a recurring theme all through the 75-minute particular: little brother Sean desperately hopes that this would be the 12 months he lastly will get a motorbike, whereas his mom is scrounging bones on the butcher, pretending she has a canine to be able to make weak broth. When the inevitable “true that means of Christmas” message arrives, it does so from a place to begin of understanding that materials wealth is less complicated to disavow when you’ve already skilled it.
However coded into its makes an attempt to subvert yuletide materialism is The Heist Earlier than Christmas’s important drawback. With its two younger leads – performed ably by Todd and McClees – and a script from Ronan Blaney that turns into more and more slapstick, it feels prefer it should be geared toward youthful kids. And but there are creeping grownup themes that may push household viewing away: gun violence, dementia, and, most stunning of all, a scene the place Patricia slaps her pre-teen son throughout the face. It’s a second for which the narrative requires the viewers’ mercy, although it’s by no means addressed or redressed. As an alternative, the motion strikes on, Shane MacGowan croons “Fairytale of New York” and Michael Bublé warbles by means of “It’s Starting to Look a Lot Like Christmas”. However this imaginative and prescient of Christmas appears to be like much more like a kitchen sink drama than we’re used to.
This is a wonderful thought, however requires a assured, unmediated execution that this lacks. The Heist Earlier than Christmas’s cinematography appears to be like low cost – ceaselessly over-lit within the method that low-budget movies on rushed manufacturing schedules typically are – and the motion choreography is equally hammy. When Nesbitt’s prison is punched within the face or lands on his testicles, it lacks tactility. And a automotive chase (albeit in buggies twinkling with fairy lights) feels agonisingly sluggish, just like the movie’s insurer was standing on the aspect with a clipboard and a pace gun. All of it contributes to the movie feeling focused at audiences youthful than its themes (“This lot gained’t be shopping for hen and pretending it’s turkey on the large day,” whistles Nesbitt when he spies a parked Ferrari, an implication that few eight-year-olds will perceive).
It’s essential to applaud the will to do one thing totally different with festive filmmaking, in any other case, we find yourself in an everlasting loop of Dickens variations and romcoms involving burnt-out bigshots returning to their hick hometowns. The Heist Earlier than Christmas is one thing uncommon. However in its tonal imbalance, aesthetic wobbliness, and lack of final dedication to its anti-capitalist core, it misses the true that means of Christmas: that distinction is one thing price celebrating.