In a world where Garry Marshall’s recent oeuvre exists, it’s hard to imagine there’s a more irritating way to throw random vignettes together and call them a movie. Yet here we have co-writer/director Mitch Davis’s collection of tales about a bunch of New Yorkers—a wealthy businessman (Patrick Stewart); an office worker (Jon Heder) and the boss who just laid him off (Max Casella); a surgeon (Gary Cole) and his team—trapped in elevators after a Christmas Eve power failure. Predictably, there are a few ways in which these stories end up connected, though not in ways that make them any more interesting. And while they all exist on various points on the goofy-to-semi-serious spectrum, they offer virtually no insight, because they have the same problem so many similar movies have: Every character comes with exactly one character trait, and only so that the jerk can become nicer, the wallflower can become more confident, etc. If it’s trying in some way to promote focusing on What Really Matters this holiday season, it certainly taught me that I’d rather not waste time on vapid homilies.
By
Scott Renshaw