CHRISTMAS CAPSULES: Christmas Cupid's Arrow (aka The Christmas Cupid) (2018)

Director: Michael D. Sellers
Writer(s): Brian Marchetti, Jack Marchetti, and Jamie R. Thompson
Starring: Elisabeth Harnois, Jonathan Togo, Chad Michael Collins, and Sasha Jackson

Well shit, isn't that a goddamned stupid title? What the hell does it even mean? Now that I've sat down and watched the entire movie, I can tell you that...I still have no idea. Especially considering the alternate title is the much more sensical A Christmas Cupid—why not just stick to that one?

Anyway, assuming you can get past the horrible first ten minutes, and then get past the horribly half-baked plot, this one is actually fairly enjoyable. Resident Christmas movie actress, and former child star Elisabeth Harnois is once again the lead here, playing a college professor named Holly (how original!) who is looking for love. So, of course, her friend signs her up for an online dating service, where she meets a good-looking man who also happens to be a complete moron. Lacking the words necessary to appeal to the scholarly woman (and also ignoring the fact that, even aside from that, they have no chemistry together whatsoever), he enlists the help of his ol' college buddy David—who's a writer with a dead wife and young child—to help him find the words that will help him get in her pants.

But the “twist” here is that David is falling for Holly himself, being paired up with her to help design the company's winter formal dance...and he has no idea that Holly is the woman he's writing love poems to on behalf of his douchy friend! Wow these plots just keep getting worse and worse...

Anyway, this one is a "winner" (in the loosest sense of the term) thanks to the cast, who are all uniformly solid in career-destroying roles. Sasha Jackson is adorably hilarious as Holly's right-hand woman, Emily, delivering perfectly-timed zingers and elevating her character to a level that few holiday supporting actresses can match. Seriously, she's damn near brilliant, and singlehandedly makes this movie way more enjoyable than it should be in every scene she's in.

Jonathan Togo is likable as “the man behind the words”...although he does sometimes go a little bit overboard in later scenes, delivering his lines with an intensity more fit for a real movie, rather than one of these half-baked holiday turds. Ms. Harnois, being a seasoned vet, seems to have this whole Christmas movie acting thing down pat, and proves to be a reliable leading lady.

As the saying goes, you can't polish a turd, and Christmas Cupid's Arrow is still one of those thanks to its ignorant title, and equally stupid plot, that would have been an utter disaster with a different cast. But these are people you wouldn't mind spending a little bit of time with—and 90 minutes is the perfect length to ensure that, unlike your family, they don't stick around and completely overstay their welcome.

STRAY OBSERVATION 

• I must say this has one of the more believable “this guy that I think is great is actually a complete douchebag and I should probably break up with him” reveals of any generic holiday movie I've ever seen.

RATING: 5.5/10

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MARVEL-LESS MARVISTA: The Work Wife (2018)

Director: Michael Feifer
Writer(s): Feifer
Starring: Cerina Vincent, Elisabeth Harnois, Kevin Sizemore, and Preeti Desai

MarVista Entertainment’s The Work Wife takes place in the kind of world where doors don’t exist, continuity and characterizations don’t matter, and no one seems to have any awareness of their own surroundings. How else can you explain why characters who are trying to be secretive, obliviously perform said actions right out in the open, in full view of co-workers? Or how characters’ beliefs change on a whim, with nothing remotely resembling just cause or believability? Or how no one locks their doors, even when the immediate threat of danger is present? Or how a character is murdered by being flung down stairs in the middle of a packed party, with no witnesses? (Also, how is it that throwing someone down stairs is even an option for murder in thrillers, considering the odds of the victim actually dying is pretty slim on a standard staircase?)

Sean Miller is the new executive at an advertising firm. His assistant, Jen, is immediately smitten with him, and—judging from the completely blatant staredown he gives her upon meeting her for the first time—those feelings are reciprocated. They only seem to intensify when Sean’s first meeting lands his firm their biggest client account to date. But there’s just one problem with pursuing a relationship with Jen: Whether or not he wants to be, Sean is married.

His wife, Lisa, is a graphic designer (of course!) who’s looking to return to work after taking a break following the move for Sean's job. Well, the whole marriage thing doesn’t seem to deter Jen, who invites Sean’s wife, Lisa, out with the work family one night and tosses lines out like “There’s a joke going around that I’m his work wife,” (I’m paraphrasing, but you get the point) while getting a video of her badmouthing a client's alcoholic beverage brand. Uh oh, can’t see how that could be used against Lisa at any point, like when she’s brought on board as a graphic designer (at Jen's urging) and the video is played during a meeting with executives of the Gin Tonic company—the very one she’s badmouthing!

Things progress from there, with Jen stalking Sean, who (surprisingly!) refuses all of her advances, eventually becoming disgusted with her as her obsession quickly reaches a fever pitch. It should come as no shock that this isn't the first boss of hers that she has grown infatuated with...and at least one previous one even ended in murder. Can Lisa and Sean survive Jen’s murderous ways, or will they succumb to her boss fetish like others before?

Being a MarVista film, there are plenty of issues at play here, though the biggest one is logic: even after Jen’s obsessive qualities become more and more apparent, Lisa still threatens to leave Sean based solely on Jen's word-of-mouth evidence, believing the habitual liar who set their house on fire, sabotaged Lisa's job, sent threatening texts to herself with Sean’s phone (which she acquired by walking through their front door at night, and literally taking it off their dresser as they slept three feet away), and murdered her last spouse, over the man she’s been married to for several years, and who, by all indications, has always been faithful to her. Okay, makes sense.

Or the random scene where a spurned character from earlier in the film, who by this point we have completely forgotten about, shows up at a party to drunkenly answer the phone and stand awkwardly in a doorway right out in the open to talk to someone about his plans to have Jen taken in by the police in the morning. Of course, somehow, amidst the dozens of partygoers in an obnoxiously loud party atmosphere, at a sprawling multi-story mansion, she zones in on him and gets so close she can hear his words without him even noticing. 

Not helping matters is the acting, which is pretty bad across the board, with a special nod going to the drunk guy, who acts as if he just came out of a coma following trauma to his brain rather than an individual who's merely inebriated. How these things can not only get greenlit, but also go into production, pass through an editing room, and presumably go through screenings for executives and/or test audiences without anyone feeling remarkable guilt or shame for unleashing these hellish monstrosities on the world is something I will never understand.

Occasionally, it even has the gall to make a play at framing this whole story as some sort of feminist war-cry, insinuating that several women within the firm are in on Sean’s undoing, but never fully exploring that story angle outside of one or two random scenes. That might have actually been its best bet, but it's yet another idea that seems to have been abandoned in favor of a by-the-numbers thriller that's completely devoid of thrills.

About the only things preventing it from being a complete bomb are the presence of Preeti Desai, who is gorgeous but wasted in a limited role as Sean (and Jen's) boss, and the simple fact that Sean never physically cheats on his wife, at least avoiding one cliché prevalent in the typical “obsession” movie. Other than those two things, The Work Wife functions best as a study to see just how abysmally thrill-less a thriller can be.

RATING: 3/10

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