By Webster Tilton If you go to the store and buy a can of Spam, you are not allowed to complain that it wasn’t fillet mignon. You saw the label. You knew what was in it, and you picked the Spam anyway. As for me, my only excuse is that there were exactly two choices, and this one looked marginally...

By Webster Tilton

If you go to the store and buy a can of Spam, you are not allowed to complain that it wasn’t fillet mignon. You saw the label. You knew what was in it, and you picked the Spam anyway. As for me, my only excuse is that there were exactly two choices, and this one looked marginally less awful. Apparently, November is a dry month for the Netflix release schedule. Who knew?

So in spite of the cheesy title and the teeth-clenchingly awful trailer I felt obliged to give this movie a fair shake and not judge it too harshly. Let it be what it was intended to be and then ask the question; did it do a good job of that? No. No it didn’t.

Our main character is Abby, a girl in her mid-twenties stuck in a dead-end job-from-hell as an assistant photographer at someone else’s studio. And credit where credit is due, the lead actress Kat Graham does a good job of making her job look soulless, miserable and dull.

Here’s the gimmick; Abby gets an antique advent calendar from her Grandfather. Lo and behold the calendar is magic and every day another door on the calendar opens and whatever pops out of it is what Abby winds up getting in real life. The gimmick is fine, there’s nothing objectively wrong with the gimmick. What’s wrong with the movie is everything else.

Somewhere someone came up with a checklist of how to make a movie that (A) doesn’t have any glaring continuity errors, (B) has enough production value that it doesn’t look crappy, (C) has a plot a coma patient could follow and (D) doesn’t offend anyone.

Check, check, check, check.

A) The story makes sense and nobody does anything contradictory

B) Netflix spent enough money; the movie looks ok.

C) Everything that happens is spelled out and spoon fed to the audience no matter how obvious.

D) The movie is aggressively PC. Whoever wrote the script made damn sure that even the nit-pickiest, hypersensitive family entertainment watchdog group couldn’t complain. The film is so preoccupied with being inoffensive that every joke falls flat.

There’s one exception to D; Abby’s boss is a gigantic middle-eastern-small-business-owner stereotype. This is a serious problem because, apart from Abby, her boss is the only person in the whole damn movie with any kind of a flaw, and therefore the only person in the movie that feels human. Everyone else feels like they were drafted from the set of a toothpaste commercial.

And when she’s not being miserable at her job, Abby doesn’t feel very human either. She doesn’t have any bad habits, never offends anyone, is loved by all, and her only flaw is that she’s addicted to the safety of her crappy job. But that’s fine because this film was intended for people who are addicted to the safety and inoffensiveness of crappy movies.
But I really can’t blame anyone; after all, the label said Spam.