Sneaking in just before the fleet of red Coca-Cola trucks comes barreling into town, it’s the arrival of Netflix’s made-for-pittance festive lineup, a holiday tradition that’s similarly bad for your teeth. In 2023, it was kicked off by the deceptively titled Best. Christmas. Ever!, a rotten nadir not just for the genre but for film as a whole last year, and so the perfectly competent Meet Me Next Christmas lands with a respectable shrug. Things have been, and undoubtedly will get, worse in the streamer’s most overstuffed subgenre, so inoffensively watchable will do.
Its low-level success is partly down to Chappelle’s Show director Rusty Cundieff and largely down to lead Christina Milian, the one-time R&B star who has become a staple of the cheapo romcom, first on ABC Family with Snowglobe and Christmas Cupid before graduating to Netflix with Falling Inn Love and the surprisingly enjoyable Resort to Love. She’s been an entertainer of some sort since the age of 15 and there’s a safe-hands ease to her performance here, securing us on side early on. Like a lot of these films, the plot is built from stolen blocks, this time they come from 2001’s John Cusack/Kate Beckinsale romcom Serendipity and Arnie’s 1996 kids caper Jingle All the Way. It cribs the magical meet-cute of the former and partners it with the stressful scramble of the latter, as the romantic future of Milian’s Layla might depend on whether or not she can land a ticket to a sold-out concert.
In the first scene, her journey to New York for Christmas is interrupted by a snowstorm that lands her in the lounge next to a handsome stranger (Girls Trip’s Kofi Siriboe). As they flirt, she tells him of her festive ritual, going to see cheesy a cappella group Pentatonix with her handsome boyfriend. As they part, he suggests that if they’re both single next year they should meet at the concert. A year later, reeling from being cheated on, she’s determined to find a ticket so she can meet him again, enlisting the help of a concierge company. She’s matched with, you might have guessed, a handsome helper (former NFL player Devale Ellis) and they’re sent on a manic search across New York.
Except, as you also might have guessed, it’s not really New York but rather a very recognisable Toronto instead and while the overall corner-cutting cheapness might be more distracting in another Netflix section (like in last week’s rubbishy looking teen slasher Time Cut), the chintz is part of the charm here. These films are, after all, modelled on Hallmark’s micro-budget range (you can almost feel a few fade-to-blacks for commercial breaks).
Cundieff helps it feel light on its feet and, aside from one hugely unfunny comic interlude involving a rich couple with a ticket, Molly Haldeman and Camilla Rubis’s script is refreshingly not annoying. Milian is charmingly game and has decent chemistry with Ellis even if their film often feels less like a romcom and more like either a strange Pentatonix tour ad or a dangerous Pentatonix drinking game (a shot of eggnog every time someone says Pentatonix will kill you before Christmas). It doesn’t feel like anyone in the real world would care or ever has cared this much about one of their concerts but then this film does not exist in the real world and who would expect or want it to. It exists in Netflix festive movie world, an ever-expanding place of ever-diminishing returns, and while this won’t be a film someone would consider returning to next Christmas, it’ll just about do for now.