"Hey Santa! Wanna Party...?"
So here it is, Merry Christmas! Everybody's having fun, look to the future now... Okay, time to stop. The annual season of mass consumerism, wasted mince pies and cheesy red jumpers is upon us and where Christmas follows, so does certain inevitabilities; last ditch shopping, the Doctor Who special and of course, the release of cheesy Christmas movies. Picking up the slack this year is Office Christmas Party, a seasonal comedy which adheres to the blueprint of many before it by squeezing as many famous faces as possible into the mix in the hope that the glowing smile of Jennifer Aniston can take the audience's attention away from the dire script holding it together. Although not entirely terrible in the backlog of awful comedies, Office Christmas Party is pretty much a 90 minute booze-fest, one which not only has the cringey themes of sexism, toilet humour and general awfulness of party culture films such as Project X and The Hangover, but also adds cheesy, wooden narratives that unfortunately are created to collide with the seasonal nature of the film. Did the film get me ready for Christmas though? No. No. No.
With these types of movies it is strikingly obvious that deep thought and some sort of underlying themes are completely absent, with the main goal of course being that sweet sound of a cash register, and whilst Office Christmas Party isn't the first movie to abide by these rules, and undoubtedly won't be the last, you could be forgiven for thinking it might be a complete stinker. The harsh truth however is that Office Christmas Party isn't even that, it's just passable fluff, fluff which will bound to suit a certain breed of audience but for me, does nothing at all except wishing I was watching It's A Wonderful Life instead. After his rather cracking performance in The Gift, it's a real shame to see Jason Bateman return to easy ground whilst Kate McKinnon attempts to continue her reputation as the kooky linchpin of the movie after her performance in the recent Ghostbusters remake. If this is the type of movie Christmas will continue to offer, I might just hibernate through next years' annual festivities but at the same time, at least we have Star Wars to look forward to.
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