Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jen Maravegias | Film | December 11, 2025
I try not to expect too much from the holiday movies that streamers produce. Entertain me for ninety minutes while I’m folding laundry, cooking dinner, or picking belly button lint. The Jonas Brothers Christmas movie was surprisingly entertaining. Was it good? Objectively, no. But I laughed a couple of times, and I made it through the whole thing without wanting to stab myself in the eyes with candy canes.
I can’t say the same about Netflix’s Jingle Bell Heist or Hulu’s Joy To The World. On paper, both of these movies were ripe for chaos, hijinks, and wacky Christmas-themed shenanigans. Unfortunately, the writers decided not to do any of that. OK, that’s unfair. There are half-hearted attempts in both of these movies to lean into the potential slapstick inherent in the scripts. But no one seemed willing to fully commit.
Jingle Bell Heist is about Sophia (Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger’s Olivia Holt), a petty thief living and working in London to pay for her mother’s cancer treatment. She works as a counter girl at Sterling’s, a fancy department store, part-time at a pub, and also pickpockets people in her spare time. One day, she gets caught on a security camera stealing cash from the store’s secure room.
Luckily, the person reviewing the footage doesn’t even work for the store. Nick (Connor Swindells from Sex Education) is a down-on-his-luck computer hacker/program designer who previously designed the store’s security system and was then promptly sent to jail for trying to rob the store years earlier. He wants to rob the store again so he can afford to rent a nice apartment to help him get partial custody of his daughter.
Nick convinces Sophia to help him when her mother needs an expensive procedure that cannot be covered by public health insurance. Their plan involves creating an in-store diversion that has to do with a popular toy selling out, seducing the store-owner’s (Peter Serafinowicz) neglected wife (Silent Night’s Lucy Punch) to get a code for the safe, and infiltrating a security company’s Christmas party dressed as Santa. There were a lot of opportunities for big physical comedy moments that were disappointingly passed up. For example, their plan to start a riot in the store by convincing shoppers that a very popular doll had sold out was entirely underwhelming. What should have been a Cabbage Patch Kid-level event was just four or five people grappling with each other and some boxes in the middle of the shop floor.
In the end, it turns out the store owner was behind the theft that resulted in Nick’s original arrest, and he had already stolen all the items Nick and Sophia planned to steal as part of an insurance scam. It was a fitting role for Serafinowicz. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see much of him, or Lucy Punch, in Jingle Bell Heist. They could have been epic, Disney-level villains if they had been allowed to go full throttle. But decisions were made, and performances that could have been were lost to time. And the time I spent watching Jingle Bell Heist is time I’ll never get back. The pacing is slow, which kills the jokes and sight gags. And there is no chemistry between Holt and Swindells, which kills the vague romantic aspect of their relationship. Despite a promising synopsis, Jingle Bell Heist is just a slog.
Similarly, over on Hulu, Joy To The World sounded like a fun concept and featured Chad Michael Murray, who gave us a good time in last year’s Merry Gentlemen. But it also fell flat due to a lack of commitment to the bit.
Joy Edwards (Emmanuelle Chriqui, Superman & Lois) is a lifestyle guru with multiple best sellers under her belt. But everything in her books is a lie. She has no family, she doesn’t cook, her home is unremarkable, and she’s a terrible gardener. Joy thinks tomatoes are winter vegetables for crying out loud.
Her publisher decides that a popular talk show host (Ayesha Curry, Irish Wish) should do a live broadcast from Joy’s house on Christmas Eve so her fans can see how she really celebrates. Ruh roh Raggy! Joy’s in trouble now.
The plot of Joy To The World should have made it a homerun. Who doesn’t want to see some lifestyle gurus and influencers fall apart these days? It’s a wish-fulfillment ripped from the headlines kind of story.
She quickly recruits her housekeeper (Hot Frosty’s Heleene Lohan Cameron), mailman (Guy Sprung. Which is either the most fortunate or least fortunate name ever), the two teens who live next door and were abandoned by their rich parents for the holiday, and her ex-boyfriend/oldest friend (Chad Michael Murray) to pose as her family for the broadcast. Everyone gets a CliffsNotes version of her books to read to get into character, and they all have to pitch in to turn her modest, disorganized home into the spectacular dream home she’s written about.
She’s sold herself as a DIY Goddess who loves to serve home-cooked meals, but she sucks at crafting and doesn’t even own any dining room furniture. They move a ping pong table into the dining room and drape cloths over some lawn chairs to create a space for her to serve dinner on-air. There’s talk about renting chickens to round out her whole urban farm schtick, but they go with running an audio file of chicken sounds in the coop and throwing chicken feathers in the air instead.
Chad Michael Murray’s character has been living in her guest house because of plumbing repairs at his own home. They’re not dating, but they used to, and they make a lot of googly eyes at each other. Chad’s character is a painter who is trying to get his work into “the top gallery in New York City.” This plot point falls apart completely when you see his work. He paints like Thomas Kincade. It’s a lot of very corny farm landscapes and ducks. He does not paint anything that belongs in “the top gallery in New York City.” It did provide the best laugh of the movie, and I am still laughing about it.
As you may suspect, the plan falls apart, and the truth is revealed on live television. Womp womp. Joy thinks her career is over, but her publisher (Daniel Kash, who played Spunkmeyer in Aliens) assures her that he wants more books from her and that she’s more popular than ever because her fans appreciate authenticity. We all know that’s a lie. People like mess. She was messy on live television, and people eat that up with giant spoons these days. Of course she’s going to sell a zillion books.
Just like Jingle Bell Heist, Joy To The World failed to live up to the potential of the synopsis. If Katherine Hepburn could make hilarious screwball comedies, performing all manner of physical comedy bits, there is no reason why Hulu and Netflix should cop out and produce these dull rom-coms that are begging for a pie in the face or a few good pratfalls. And they failed as sweet, tender romances, too. There’s no chemistry between either lead couple, and there’s no real romance. These movies are as sexless as superhero movies, but there are no action sequences to distract us from that. Just Chad Michael Murray’s hair.
If streamers are going to keep buying and developing scripts for holiday movies that have such madcap loglines as these two, they need to deliver on that promise, or I’m just going to rewatch Hot Frosty next year.
