Christmas Karma

Around this time of year, you can hardly throw a Christmas tree bauble in a multiplex without hitting a new adaptation of Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. There are so many versions of the famous festive parable that nobody is quite sure how many have been made; Wikipedia’s best guess is “countless”. One thing we can be sure of — we don’t really need another one.

Defiant and disruptive to her core, along comes Gurinder Chadha, a filmmaker who made her name with Bend It Like Beckham back in 2002, and has since cast her multicultural lens on the likes of Jane Austen (Bride And Prejudice) and Frank Capra (It’s A Wonderful Afterlife). In Christmas Karma, she gives the Dickensian classic a genuinely intriguing, narratively rich wrinkle: what if Scrooge were Hindu?

Chadha gives the iconic miser one of his most interesting backstories in any Christmas Carol adaptation.

So here, Ebeneezer Scrooge becomes Eshaan Sood, played by The Big Bang Theory’s Kunal Nayyar as a grumpy conservative Indian who rails against Christmas not just for its Yuletide joy, but because his religion does not celebrate it. “This madness is not for us!” he cries, raising interesting and cogent questions about how a Christian holiday is received in a diverse, multifaith country like Britain.

Chadha gives the iconic miser one of his most interesting backstories in any Christmas Carol adaptation: a history informed not only by a lost love but the trauma of being expelled from Uganda during the regime of Idi Amin, and the nightmare of coming to the UK a British citizen, only to be racially abused. Few genre filmmakers working in this country are consistently bringing this vantage point to mainstream genre films.

But while the premise and perspective are admirable, the execution leaves something to be desired; there is a lot going on here and it isn’t just politically conscious parables. Within the first 20 minutes, we are treated to a breakdancing Santa, a grime rap about the cost-of-living crisis, and — for unclear reasons — a video-game-esque CG version of an unrecognisable Hugh Bonneville. The prophetic ghosts are no less baffling, a hare-brained, Mad Libs bit of stunt casting: there’s Eva Longoria as a Day-Of-The-Dead-styled Ghost Of Christmas Past, Billy Porter as a soul-singing Ghost Of Christmas Present, and — sure, why not! — Boy George as a warbling Ghost Of Christmas Future.

Then they start singing, and things start to nosedive. Chadha is clearly nodding to Bollywood, and the presence of Indian megastars like Priyanka Chopra — singing ‘Last Christmas (Desi Version)’ over the credits — and Bhangra singers Jassi Sidhu and Malkit Singh lend it some appropriate prestige. But you need to hire someone better than Gary Barlow to write the songs. This is the kind of soundtrack that will have you muttering, “Humbug!” under your breath.

The scale and sweep here never reaches Bollywood’s grand heights. Instead, it has an end-of-the-pier Christmas panto feel, a cheap-and-cheerful approach with constant sloppiness: singing often out of sync, noticeable green-screen and janky CGI, cheap-looking projections on walls, and acting that is, with the best will in the world, somewhat amateurish. The scale of it feels televisual rather than cinematic. It’s aiming for Ealing but coming off like an EastEnders Christmas special (an effect compounded by the presence of Danny Dyer, as a singing cabbie called Colin).

The budget has clearly gone to the copious Christmas jumpers. But if nothing else, it sets out exactly what it is intending to do. With its touristy conception of London — copious establishing shots of Big Ben and Oxford Street, chocolate-box multicoloured terraces, the entirety of London gathering at Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland for a knees-up — it is clear Chadha is gunning for Richard Curtis’ Christmas crown. For all its flaws, this is the sort of film destined to be a festive perennial. And there’s always an audience for that.