PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 12/13/07)

An inoffensive piece of seasonal movie-muzak, The Perfect Holiday follows the Christmastime drama of Nancy (Gabrielle Union), a mom of three in the midst of a custody battle with her smarmy ex, a rapper-producer named J-Jizzy (an underused Charlie Murphy), as well as in the throes of new love with Benjamin (Morris Chestnut), a struggling songwriter with a daytime gig as a mall Santa. Benjamin starts his relationship with Nancy off on the wrong foot, fibbing to her that he's actually a steady office-supplies salesman instead of owning up to being a guy with a low bank account. His lie becomes harder to weasel out of when a big music producer finally takes notice of his songwriting talent, and that producer just happens to be J-Jizzy. Oh, the complications

Although it's arguably worth eleven bucks just to gawk at Gabrielle Union for 90 minutes in anything, the most watchable character in the film is Jamal (Faizon Love), a 300-pound coworker of Benjamin (he's Santa's elf) who is living a lie of his own, albeit a funnier one — he's convinced his woman that he's actually a bounty hunter. His living-room wall is littered with "Wanted" posters, and he ends up foiling a crime during work because one of those poster perps happens by. By all rights, it should not be him but Charlie Murphy who's the funniest guy in the movie, but Murphy's character is underwritten and noticeably joke-deficient. In fairness, though, the running gag about his inability to come up with appropriate song titles for his Christmas album is fairly effective — his best effort is "I Saw Mommy Capping Santa Claus."

It's not clear what Queen Latifah and Terrence Howard are doing in the movie, but the ten minutes or so of screen time they put in probably cost the producers a good portion of their budget. They're angels or something, and they appear on screen three or four times in different guises — Howard knee-walks as a little boy at one point and announces to Latifah that he "has to go dookie" — but they have no interaction with the main characters and seem to have their own subplot going on. They occasionally drop the act and speak directly to the camera and, when necessary, they can even do things like stop time and reverse it to make events in the movie come out differently. In other words, there's a very serious plot at work here that demands your strict attention… apparently.

Speaking of attention, yours might fade completely during two musical interludes, one of which is an instrumental Yamaha keyboard duet between Benjamin and John-John, (Malik Hammond), Nancy's oldest son who doesn't like him and must be won over. Sure, a movie like this functions as wallpaper, not art, but there's a limit to how far that concept can be pushed — The Perfect Holiday's amateur keyboard concert is about eight minutes of life you'll never get back. The other number is a ballad sung by J-Jizzy that contains no humor whatsoever — a terrible mistake on director Lance Rivera's part. Jizzy goes from "I Love the Ho-Ho-Hos" to earnestly crooning like Celine Dion, and Rivera (obviously a master of tonal consistency) sees no problem. It's pointless to delve deeper into Rivera's mistakes. We're talking about a movie that was formerly called The Perfect Christmas, but its filmmakers decided to back away from that "edgy" title.

— Ryan Stewart