Watched: 06/06/2025
Format: Prime
Viewing: First
Director: Christie Will Wolf
So, I thought A Holiday Heist (2011) was going to be a Hallmark movie, but it was not. It was, instead, one of the weird, trash movies that get made every year in a filmmaking economy I do not understand. It wasn't A Talking Cat!?! levels of not-giving-a-@#$%, but it was closer to that than it was theater-ready. It made your typical Hallmark movie look like It's a Wonderful Life by comparison. I do not know who this was for, where it was shown, who paid for it... Usually when something is this trash it's called something like "The Dog Who Saved Christmas", but there's no dog in this movie. They can't afford it.
The filming had to have occurred over, like, two weeks. There's maybe five locations, and all of the money went to getting hired gun actors with some name recognition to show up, do some schtick, and mostly not be there longer than two or three days.
In this case, it's Vivica A. Fox as the mean Dean of the college and Chris Kattan as a wacky uncle who has nothing to do with anything.
And... Lacey Chabert as the focal character. As she does in so many movies, she plays the anchor of the plot. She is the general-female-protagonist-with-an-artistic-bent, this time a college student skipping Christmas to work in an art gallery (Chabert herself would have been about 28 or 29 when this was filmed).
Look, the movie is straight terrible. It never should have been released anywhere but into a bucket of concrete, and then thrown into the deepest part of the sea.
For some shots, it doesn't seem like they had usable takes as actors stumble over each other's lines (and this is not Altman), and I'm kinda convinced one of the actors was high as a kite while they were filming. The movie is easily 80% padding to fill the runtime. It's insanely racist in a way that would make a 1980's movie blush, and wildly fat-phobic, mistaking "heavy-set" for My 600-lb Life. It could also be read as Franco-phobic and homophobic. YMMV.
The plot itself hinges on the absolute ignorance by the three credited screen writers regarding the entire premise of their own movie.
Vivica Fox is a Dean of a small California college - and worried about her contract (not how that works). She's thinking if she sets up a scenario where she saves the valuable paintings from the college's galleries from being stolen (?), she will get her contract renewed (not how that works). And they will give her a pension. (not how that works, either). This gallery on a college campus also holds auctions? (not how that works). And needs to be open over Christmas Eve and Day (no) and so they hire six students to act as docents (a possible maybe).
When the thieves go to steal the paintings on Christmas Eve, our docents are all still there, waiting for their friend to come back with Chinese food. Because it makes sense to eat dinner in an art gallery?
The scenes with the students are not good, but the movie leans entirely into two comedic performers playing the campus security guards who will steal the paintings for Fox. They basically seem like the two doofy dudes from early Power Rangers who were there for comedic relief. Except the Power Rangers guys had some dignity.
By the way, out of nowhere, despite the fact this movie is about a small, southern California college, there's an establishing shot that is clearly the University of Texas with the red roofs and UT Tower. I guess in looking for "small, California, college campus" they stumbled across this footage and thought "let's show a 50,000 student university from another state".
The movie runs the longest 89 minute runtimes I've had on this Chabert-a-Thon, minus The Lost Tree. Because it's failing at comedy, it's not even a good time like Birdemic. Instead it's watching everyone involved just die on the screen and do their dopey schtick. It made me sad for Lacey, who doesn't even get schtick. Maybe the drugs on set where good? Maybe the pay was phenomenal?
I checked the runtime multiple times. Like, we're 25 minutes in when they finally get to what the movie is about. At 35 minutes I was asking how much longer we had. At 55 minutes I thought maybe we were wrapping up soon and almost wept to realize how much was left.
Vivica Fox will kind of do anything if you sign her up, and I salute her for doing some very broad comedy here. Chris Kattan... you just kind of end up worried about all over again.
Is it stupid?
Yes, and not in the fun way the director intends. It's just shit.
I won't say Chabert is bad in this, but the movie does her no favors. And then she has this odd moment in the movie where she talks about Christmas when she was young, and it feels detached from the whole rest of the movie and you think "oh, this movie has like two competent minutes in it".
One of the odd things about this tour is that I sometimes retroactively feel concerned for Chabert. What was 2011 like for her? Well, this is the only live-action feature-length project she had released that year. It's a bit of a slow down, career-wise. Which is odd as she was working pretty consistently in 2009 and 2010, but then in 2011 and 2012, she had a dry spell. But, of course, it all worked out, and we'll discuss more at some point.
By the way, below is the official poster for the movie, and these characters aren't in it, it's barely about money, and this never happens. I am 85% sure the woman is writer/ director Christie Will Wolf.
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