Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on December 11, 2015.

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Director: Jessie Nelson 
Cast: Diane Keaton, Olivia Wilde, Amanda Seyfried, Alan Arkin, John Goodman, Marisa Tomei
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Length: 107 minutes
Opening: Now playing

It’s that time of year again — Christmas carols, Christmas sales and most importantly, Christmas movies. We all have our favourites; from the classic It’s a Wonderful Life to Home Alone and Love, Actually. Watching our favourite Christmas-themed movies on Christmas day has become a tradition that many of us look forward to in addition to gobbling delicious food and gift-opening. This Yuletide season, a superstar cast consisting of Diane Keaton, Olivia Wilde, Amanda Seyfried, Alan Arkin, John Goodman and Marisa Tomei join forces in Love the Coopers. 

With Steve Martin serving as narrator, Love the Coopers had pretty much everything going for it, except all the promise that this incredible cast showed falls flat. A combination of a weak script and underdeveloped characters contributed to its ultimate failure to evoke a sense of Christmas joy and elicit genuine laughter from the audience. 

Love the Coopers revolves around married couple Sam and Charlotte Cooper; played by Goodman and Keaton respectively, and their extended family. The dysfunctional Coopers are made up of hopeless kids, a kleptomaniac sister, a father who’s hopelessly in love with a waitress who’s young enough to be his granddaughter and other fringe characters whose storylines are so sidelined that one wonders why they are there in the first place. 

Perhaps the only storyline worth following in the movie is the one which Wilde plays — Sam and Charlotte’s daughter, Eleanor. Beautiful, intelligent, independent and most importantly, sane, Eleanor dreads going home to her parents’ house every Christmas because her family always sees her as a disappointment. So this year, she decides to hang out at the airport to kill time in order to avoid going to her parents’ home. While there, she meets Joe (Jake Lacy), a soldier who happens to be spending Christmas alone, waiting to be shipped out. The duo hatch a plan to have Joe masquerade as Eleanor’s boyfriend, although neither knows anything about each other. 

Love the Coopers tries hard — a little too hard, sometimes — to be funny, and as a result, almost none of the gags and jokes end up being truly hilarious. A weak script coupled with Martin’s annoying voiceover spoils what could have been a fun Christmas movie. There is so much narration that one feels like they’re listening to an audio book instead of watching a film. 

It tries very hard to be like Love, Actually, with its intertwining plot and characters that are somehow connected to each other, but where Love, Actually was heart-warming and thought-provoking, Love the Coopers is a bit forced, and does not expand on all the characters enough to make the audience particularly interested in their lives. If some outlying characters were written off altogether and the plot made to focus on the central cast, this movie could have had a lot more potential. After all, some of them are truly likeable, such as Eleanor, Joe and Bucky (Arkin), while others could be made to be genuinely funny, like Hank and his daughter.

This Christmas, it might be a better bet to rewatch an old favourite instead of heading to the cinema to catch Love the Coopers.

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