Holiday Rush
See that picture to up there of all those happy people? That picture is a lie! Man, those people are miserable AF! I mean you are gonna have to watch a lot of holiday movies this season to find some people as f'n miserable as those brothers and sisters right there. But then that picture represents the end of the movie which dictates everyone has to be happy. The path to this contrived joy... well... that might be the problem here.
Say hello to Rush Williams (Romany Malco) the hottest morning show DJ in NYC on whatever radio station this is, with this success largely attributed to the hard work of his producer Roxy (Sonequa Martin-Green). Now I don't know what a local radio host makes, but Rush is straight paid. He has this giant, beautiful gated home off of a lake somewhere in NYC, which the land itself has to cost millions, and this fantastic life he lives has allowed him to spoil his children into being some of worst, most entitled human beings you will ever want to meet. Except the twins. They're sweet.
Rush and Roxy have been moving forward with the plan for part ownership of the station, currently owned by Marshall (Deion Cole), but alas on this morning they get the news they've been bought out by this realities version of Comcast, with this acquisition headed up by the cartoonishly evil Ms . Hawkings (Tamala Jones), and one sad meeting later, poor Rush and Roxy are out on their asses. With Ms. Hawkins literally cackling. We could ask why a company would take over a radio station in an urban market, fire this stations top earner, in this decidedly urban market, and replace him with a Jenny McCarthy equivalent. But we're not gonna ask these questions.
Widowed dad Rush losing his job is bad news, but the worst news is how his children reacted to him losing his job. The twins Eva and Gaby (Andrea Marie-Alphonse and Selena Marie-Alphonse) aren't going to get their ponies. They handled it the best. Fifteen year old Mya (Deysha Nelson) has pretty much frozen her father out her life, if for no other reason than she might have to start shopping at Bargain Hunt. Harvard bound Jamal (Amarr M. Wooten) has Lost. His. Mind. More on that later.
Roxy has a plan to buy the old radio station they used to work at using some cash she has stashed, Auntie Jo (Darlene Love) also has a nice cache of cash just lying around and Rush is going to sell the house to help pay for this venture, which of course drives his children deeper into insanity, especially when they learn that they have to move back to the old neighborhood and live with Aunt Jo. The twins seemed okay with it. They're sweet. Thing is the evil Ms. Hawkings can't have this little indy radio venture take off so she does some evil stuff to shut them down even before the start, but meanwhile, on the urging of Dead Wife (La La Anthony) who pops in sporting a gold halo, Rush has decided to pursue the obvious love thing with Roxy, which actually makes all the kids happy since she's really been the main mother figure in their lives since Dead Mom was murdered some years back. Or Cancer. I can't remember. But I'm thinking because of how often Holiday Movie Mom's die of cancer, someone might want to bring Erin Brockovich in on the case to investigate what's in the water these ladies are drinking. Oh...Jamal isn't happy about the love as he loses what little mind he had left. He's already skipping class, ignoring curfew and back talking pretty much everybody, but upon the announcement of Rush and Roxy's love proclamation, he just runs away from home and joins MS13 or something. I think. I can't remember.
These kids need to learn the TRUE meaning of Christmas and that means meeting homeless people and orphans. And it works! Who knew it would be that easy? Except for Jamal who is still running around Queens working his way up the MS13 ladder, until he and his dad have a true heart to heart about why he's gone nuts and what's really important. And that works too! It had something to do with something I can't remember. And Ms. Hawkings evil plan falls flat on its face, and Deion Cole's character decides to fund the radio station and Rush and Roxy's love is cemented by Pajamas. It's complicated. This happens in like the last five minutes of this movie leading to that happy scene of those otherwise miserable people up there. Merry Christmas!
So you put Romany Malco in a movie, a really funny dude, chances are I'm going to watch it. Then throw in Deion Cole, an even funnier dude, then it's almost certain I'm going to watch it. THEN you toss in Sonequa Martin-Green whom I would pay good money simply to watch this woman put in her contact lenses...now we're all in. Then as a bonus we even have Tamala Jones, for which we will always have the March 2006 issue of Smooth Magazine between us. But that's another story. Alas Netflix hired all these talented people and then just stuck them in a run of the mill Hallmarky Christmas movie, which in of itself isn't so bad because a decent cast can help these generic holiday movies rise above a little, but they made these kids, except the twins, so terrible that the entire enterprise was kind of difficult to deal with at times. There are other things in the actual narrative that didn't come close to connecting or made very little sense, but to be honest we don't worry about any of that kind of stuff in these movies, we just want to like the characters a little bit and observe how tightly they stick to formula.
Now as far as the formula is concerned the filmmakers did a pretty good job of making this movie as Hallmarky as possible. Lots of Christmas music playing in the background, albeit a little funkier than you may be used to, we had some snow come to play in the end, we had a near miss kiss, Aunt Jo was bringing in all kinds of old people wisdom, some cute kids in the Twins... not the teenagers... a little hot chocolate drinking, with the added bonus of some hard liquor drinking and Christmas PJ's which should be a new standard in these things. We also had a Christmas Tree shopping scene but the terrible teenagers totally ruined that with their special brand of spoiled entitlement. How does one manage to ruin buying a Christmas Tree? There was no mistletoe or cookie baking however, nor any snowball fights, which was probably a good thing because I can see those teenagers lacing those snowballs with razor blades and rocks, but overall it was very vomit worthy. And I really did enjoy Aunt Jo's old people back in the day story. You know the 'walking 20 miles to school barefoot in the snow' tale that old people like tell? Aunt Jo told these kids that her five brothers and sisters had it so hard that they had to share an egg. One Egg! Even today eggs are pretty cheap so how broke was Aunt Jo's family that they couldn't afford an egg in like 1960? My own mother told me they were so poor that my grandma just slid the baloney over the bread to make Baloney Aroma sandwiches for the six of them. That's pretty dang poor, but I think one egg divided by six might be worse.
Holiday Rush wasn't all that good, probably made worse by the existence of some terrible children, miserable people and a wasted cast but at least it still managed to cover most of the Holiday movie basics for fans of the genre. And the third season of Star Trek Discovery will be firing up soon so we can see Queen Sonequa the way she was meant to be seen. And if she wanted to bring those locks she was wearing in this movie over to Discovery, I wouldn't be upset with them.
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