Ella McCay

This movie is so.... odd. It has some really good small pieces, and to be honest, there's the makings of a great movie here somewhere. But unfortunately it just doesn't coalesce. It feels like there were either major rewrites, or something seriously went down in the editing room.

At the end of the day, its biggest issue is that there's simply too many side plots going on. We have: Ella's career (which incorporates a couple of plot lines), her marriage, her brother, her father, her bodyguard... the list goes on. The brother could have been cut entirely (which is funny, given that what I think is the movie's best scene is with the brother), and the father plot line didn't add much either.

I think if the movie had cut a lot of the family side plots, refocused the movie to be about Ella wanting to get stuff done as a politician but being unable to (which is in the movie, but gets lost among the numerous plot threads) in addition to focusing on her marriage and the scandal, it would have been a far better movie.

It's not completely without merit, I think anyone giving it a 1 is exaggerating. As mentioned at the beginning, there's some really great individual scenes sprinkled in the movie. But overall it has very very deep flaws that really drag it down.

Looking at the cast, I went in with modest optimism...maybe a solid 6 out of 10. I expected a sweet, easy holiday rom-com that required little more than popcorn and suspension of disbelief. Instead, what I got was an awkward, tonally confused mess that mistook cringe for charm and randomness for humor. The pacing dragged, the emotional beats never landed, and by the end it felt like a complete waste of 90 minutes of my life. At least the popcorn was good.

This film is all over the place... there isn't a coherent storyline that sticks. The jokes do not land either, was not funny in any way AT ALL. I was looking forward to this as the amazing Jamie Lee Curtis is in it as is another of my favourites Woody Harrelson. I think the actors struggle to make this plot (or lack of) work but as much as they try it just doesn't work. It is definitely not recommended. I don't score 4/10 often but this deserves the score I'm sorry to say. Have a great day.

I remember seeing the trailers for this film and I felt truly intrigued as it looked decent. But this movie is just straight up bad unfortunately I just couldn't find this movie anything else other than boring to be put it nicely. I appreciate a film for wanting to take a swing at something new and James L Brooks has made some absolutely great films and I appreciate his creative risk here but this movie just doesn't work at all. The story here is really convoluted and confusing to put it nicely and there's so many different plots that we just fly through without spending time or even expanding on them just to make this run time even longer than what it should've been. This movie feels like it takes absolutely forever to get somewhere and the film truly doesn't do a whole lot with its story and plots. The writing is also pretty bad and it's laughable at how dumb the characters are in this film especially our lead Ella McCay and it feels like the movie is intentionally making her really dumb and stupid for no reason. This movie just doesn't really have a whole lot going on for it and none of the performances really stood out at all to me and with such a stacked cast it's disappointing to say that I felt like nobody knew what they were doing with the characters they had in this film. The movie also attempts to make lots of comedic jokes which don't land for the majority of the film and end up leaving the audience in just cringe in a sense and there's some jokes which do land but it's very rare for this film. I also didn't even realize Hans Zimmer did the score for this film and that is blowing my mind because I felt like there's barley any music used in this film and when it was used it's solid but I just didn't expect it to be from Hans Zimmer. The cinematography is also decent and there's some decent shots throughout the movie but there's just not a whole lot going here overall and I personally would recommend to skip this movie.

Ella McCay boasts a great cast, but unfortunately they are cobbled together with a muddled script and directionless story to create a rather lacklustre movie.

Tonally, the film is a mess. Is it a comedy? A drama? A satire? Who knows. Certainly not the cast or crew, as it was just all over the place in this respect. The performances didn't make any sense in the context of the story, almost feeling like caricatures of what they were trying to do.

In terms of the story and script, I really don't know what point it was trying to make. It circled around a few points and made them very poorly, but there were just too many story threads to give anything much focus. Characters and plot threads came and went in the blink of an eye, and there was no unifying theme or plot line or direction to it all.

It was also highly frustrating that practically every character in this film was highly annoying. I just simply did not care about any of them and struggled to get invested in any way to them.

I just really don't know what they were thinking with this film. A bizarre mess.