It's a very DeVito Christmas (in August) in Italy, but Film Brain thinks this weirdly isn't really a family film?
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00:00It's a very DeVito festive season in a sudden case of Christmas, a remake of the Italian film Suddenly Christmas.
00:07Lucy DeVito and Wilma Valderrama travel to Italy to tell her hotel manager father Danny that they're separating,
00:14but their daughter gets their family to hold an early Christmas in August to try and keep them together.
00:20On paper, this sounds like it has good pedigree.
00:23Andy McDowell plays a grandmother, Adrian Dunbar from Line of Duty is bizarrely cast as a comedy hotel porter,
00:30and it's directed by Peter Chelsom who helmed movies like Serendipity.
00:34And when you hear the premise and that it focuses on a precocious kid that speaks almost entirely in therapy speak,
00:40you go, oh, this is meant to be a cute family movie, right?
00:44And then it turns out it's not that.
00:46You see, this Christmas movie is weirdly horny with not one but several different subplots of cheating and infidelity,
00:54like it's some sort of bedroom farce.
00:56Even a ten-year-old claims that he has a summer girlfriend and a winter girlfriend.
01:00What?
01:01As you would imagine, the tone is very peculiar.
01:03In fact, it's just a very strange film all around, and I would say it's the product of cultural differences,
01:09but I looked up the reviews of the Italian film and it wasn't even good the first time around,
01:13so I don't even know why they remade it in English two years later.