| A Sudden Case of Christmas is about a young girl and her parents travelling to Italy to visit her grandfather, during the summer. It’s supposed to be about the girl recreating Christmas to be able to deal with her parents’ impending divorce. The problem is that it’s barely about that. The movie seems to spend most of its time with random characters that do not add to the story at all. | | 2024
Directed by: Peter Chelsom
Screenplay by: Peter Chelsom, Tinker Lindsay
Starring: Danny DeVito, Antonella Rose
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Danny DeVito is Lawrence Armanetti a loving grandfather who absolutely adores his granddaughter (that’s the good part) and owns a hotel in Italy (that’s the bad part). There are multiple storylines to include the hotel guests, and there is no point to it. I think it’s supposed to be funny, but since I can’t even tell, that’s a really bad sign. The hotel also provides an unfortunate central place for most of the action – allow me to explain: the movie is set in Italy but apart from a few scenes, you don’t see much of Italy, you just see the inside and immediate exterior of a hotel. It’s kind of like going to a beautiful exotic location for vacation and you spend all your time in the hotel.
Andie MacDowell shows up as the grandmother on the other side, except her storyline is about her husband cheating on her with a friend of hers who also happens to vacation at that hotel. I would say that storyline is so incredibly out of place in a movie like this, but the other minor guests are so much worse, and at least she has a connection with the main characters.
The heart and soul of the movie is Claire (Antonella Rose) and her relationship with her grandfather. She’s smart, observant, thoughtful, considerate, funny, and people make fun of her for communicating in a way well above her classmates, but that’s not true her classmates and Italian friends are just like her. As you have probably guessed, she’s just not in the movie enough. There are too many other diversions that distract from her and her grandfather and therefore distract from the enjoyment of the movie.
Danny DeVito is good, Antonella Rose as the young Claire is good, everybody else is decidedly not good, and are varying degrees of very bad. The character of the mother is way too one-dimensional, the father is a better character but he’s played by Wilmer Valderrama who might be just as bad of an actor as he is a person.
The basic premise of A Sudden Case of Christmas works, everything else that follows it does not that it’s hard to even care about the resolution if you get that far.
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