{"id":327260,"date":"2025-12-03T03:24:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T03:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/327260\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T03:24:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T03:24:08","slug":"oh-what-fun-review-a-forgettable-holiday-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/327260\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Oh. What. Fun.’ review: A forgettable holiday film"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelle Pfeiffer<\/a> plays a mom on the edge at Christmas time in the new movie \u201cOh. What. Fun.\u201d If the sarcastic punctuation wasn\u2019t enough of a tip off, Pfeiffer\u2019s character Claire is not having the best time. <\/p>\n

Claire\u2019s grown kids (Felicity Jones, Chlo\u00eb Grace Moretz, Dominic Sessa<\/a> ) don\u2019t appreciate her efforts. Her husband (Denis Leary) is supportive without being helpful. And she is operating as a one woman show, managing this precious time with her family and trying to keep it all cozy and happy and fun through constant, thankless labor (cooking, cleaning, wrapping, planning). She even looks fabulous on her many, many (too many?) garbage runs. But after one particularly cruel oversight from her family, she takes off from her suburban prison and doesn\u2019t tell anyone. For once, she\u2019s decided to go do something for herself.<\/p>\n

Promising though it may seem, \u201cOh. What. Fun\u201d is a movie that does very little with its setup and terrific cast (including the likes of Danielle Brooks, Joan Chen, Maude Apatow, Rose Abdoo and Eva Longoria<\/a> in almost cameo-sized roles) opting instead for the most generic version of itself.<\/p>\n

The movie, streaming Wednesday on Prime Video<\/a>, begins with a kind of \u201clow point\u201d (for a beautiful, well-off, stay-at-home Texas mom, that is) in which she tells some children in a neighboring car at a gas station to be nicer to their exhausted mother in the front seat. \u201cShe\u2019ll be dead someday,\u201d she says calmly and seriously. She wishes the mother a Merry Christmas, gives the kids a piercing look and then we get the dreaded freeze-frame\/record scratch and a voiceover about being entitled to a little outburst around the holidays and a half-hearted rant about how many holiday movies are about men. Already this movie is making this poor woman apologize.<\/p>\n

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\"This<\/p>\n

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\u201cThey need to make a movie about the true heroes of the holidays: Moms,\u201d Claire says. Sure, yes, preach Claire, even if her exclusions are suspect and her examples need further review. I\u2019m pretty sure \u201cHome Alone\u201d was at least a little bit about the mom, and that \u201cPlanes, Trains and Automobiles\u201d doesn\u2019t deserve the vitriol. Alas, noble intentions aside, \u201cOh. What. Fun.\u201d probably wasn\u2019t what she had in mind.<\/p>\n

Director Michael Showalter co-wrote the script with the short story\u2019s author, Chandler Baker and is committed to keeping the proceedings light and breezy (no cancer diagnoses here). But the effect is a movie that seems almost embarrassed to commit to its own silly premise, rushing through everything instead of letting us enjoy this cast. Everyone gets assigned one tidy problem or flaw and no one has any sort of lived-in familial chemistry with one another.<\/p>\n

Channing (Jones) is the oldest and is married to Doug (Jason Schwartzman) who really wants her younger sister Taylor (Moretz) to think he\u2019s cool although Taylor, a serial monogamist who always brings a new woman home for the holidays, is just mean to him. Sessa is the youngest: Underemployed and recently dumped. There are two grandchildren too, Channing and Doug\u2019s twins, but they\u2019re nonentities.<\/p>\n

Claire wants one thing for Christmas: For her family to have submitted her to a contest to meet her favorite daytime talk show host, Zazzy Tims (Longoria). Of course no one got the hint. But her breaking point really comes when she realizes everyone has gone to an event that she planned without her. No one noticed she wasn\u2019t in one of the cars. And so instead of driving herself to meet them, she decides to drive to Burbank and crash the Zazzy Tims show instead.<\/p>\n

Showalter attempts to turn this road trip into a kind of \u201cPlanes, Trains and Automobiles\u201d journey, even having her share a dingy motel room with Brooks, playing a suspiciously contented delivery driver (a little on the nose for an Amazon movie). But it barely commits to the bit and they soon go their separate ways instead of embarking on a buddy trip.<\/p>\n

There must be a kind of director\u2019s jail for such restrained use of a performer like Schwartzman (as Claire\u2019s son-in-law), or using Chen as a one-joke \u201cperfect\u201d neighbor with her all-white and silver Christmas decorations.<\/p>\n

In its own way, \u201cOh. What. Fun.\u201d has also accidentally tapped into the cinematic zeitgeist. This is a year in which on screen mothers aren\u2019t just on the edge \u2013 they\u2019re in complete and total freefall. Jennifer Lawrence\u2019s feral barking in \u201cDie My Love,\u201d<\/a> Rose Byrne\u2019s waking nightmare in \u201cIf I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You,\u201d<\/a> Jessie Buckley\u2019s primal agony in \u201cHamnet.\u201d<\/a> Even Teyana Taylor\u2019s postpartum apathy in \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d<\/a> could fit.<\/p>\n

Lighter versions are welcome too \u2013 there\u2019s nothing like comedic release. But if the idea was to make something for the moms, \u201cOh. What. Fun.\u201d is about as thoughtful as a hastily scribbled card on a piece of printer paper the morning of her birthday. We can all do better.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh. What. Fun.\u201d An Amazon MGM Studios release streaming Dec. 3 is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 106 minutes. Two stars out of four.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michelle Pfeiffer plays a mom on the edge at Christmas time in the new movie \u201cOh. What. Fun.\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[166457,29119,154087,166460,88,29395,131661,26806,28464,54606,76655,166459,26808,87645,161522,166458,206,46606],"class_list":["post-327260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-chloe-moretz","tag-danielle-brooks","tag-denis-leary","tag-dominic-sessa","tag-entertainment","tag-eva-longoria","tag-felicity-jones","tag-film-reviews","tag-jason-schwartzman","tag-jennifer-lawrence","tag-jessie-buckley","tag-joan-chen","tag-lindsey-bahr","tag-maude-apatow","tag-michael-showalter","tag-michelle-pfeiffer","tag-movies","tag-rose-byrne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}