In “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie,” a synthetic holiday trifle whose main selling point is knowing and even winking at what a synthetic holiday trifle it is, one of the funniest scenes shows the Jonas Brothers showing up at a hotel in Amsterdam to see a cabaret show by Ethan, an old enemy of Nick Jonas played by Andrew Barth Feldman. It appears the two were in a Broadway show together – a musical version of “Home Alone,” with Ethan as Macaulay Culkin and Nick as the father. Ethan felt patronized by the pop star and the two did not get along.
The reason the Jonases came is because they want to hitchhike home for Christmas on Ethan’s private plane. (Their own tour plane blew up, because… well, we’ll get to that in a minute. It has something to do with meeting Santa at a bar.) Ethan, barely hiding his contempt, calls Nick onstage, where the two perform a duet from the show, a song that is both a pretty power ballad and quite gruesome (“I’ll never leave you home alone again!”). But it’s just plausible enough to make you laugh. Then, at the end of the song, Ethan’s disdain for Nick comes through, and Andrew Barth Feldman plays this with just enough wicked panache to make you laugh.
If you love Christmas movies like I do, you’ve seen the genre evolve in major ways over the past decade. In the past, we used to get a handful of them every year in movie theaters. The small screen was reserved for what I considered to be Hallmark-type TV movies, including occasional kitschy Christmas cookies like “A Very Brady Christmas” (1988). But streaming has changed all that. The small-screen Christmas movie is now an industry, with dozens of feel-good Christmas entertainments pouring out of the processor, almost all of them some combination of the following: wholesome, silly, romantic, contrived, bubbly, reverent, and overly lit, with Christmas cheer poured out like eggnog spiked with even thicker eggnog.
So that says something that makes “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie” feel like a throwaway Christmas present. even in comparison to the world of G-rated Christmas holiday fare made for streaming.
The film presents the Jonas Brothers as brilliantly stylized versions of themselves, and it sticks them in the middle of a “Can we go home for Christmas?” » a plot that resembles “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” made on a streaming budget. As the film opens, in London, Will Ferrell takes his family to see the final night of the Jonas Brothers’ final tour (the joke is that Ferrell loves the Jonases more than his own children). Coming off stage, we see that the three have been playing together for so long now (20 years!) that the excitement has sort of faded. They’re not teenage pop stars anymore. These are grown men with families who take their careers and each other for granted.
It might be exactly what you expect. But Santa Claus (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), appearing incognito as an eccentric with a short white beard who happens to be sitting next to Joe at a bar, learns of Joe’s problems and places an educational curse on the brothers: They won’t be able to come home for Christmas until they rediscover their bond and begin to like each other again. Which they will do during 80 minutes of random adventure across Europe.
Part of “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie” is standard holiday molasses, with all the dramatic richness of a fake fireplace log. But it’s interrupted by musical numbers that flow easily, since many of them, composed by Justin Tranter (and sung with a sweet vibe by the Jonases), sound like Michael Bublé heart-warmers. A few of them are presented with a wink; during a production number set in a train station, the brothers do a double take after the dancers perform a hands-under-the-knees homage to a move that has become a “Camp Rock” meme. And there’s a romance that wastes no time in falling into difficult territory: on the train, Joe, the swarthy womanizer of the group (he’s the only one who isn’t married and has children), accidentally runs into… his old childhood crush (Chloe Bennet)! Who is now a thoracic heart surgeon! And just broke up with someone!
The cringe factor almost works for the film. Kevin, the one who never left New Jersey, is the nerd Ringo of the group, and he’s sitting on something he needs to tell the rest of them. We think he’s leaving the band, but it’s just that he wants the chance to sing lead vocals. And Nick, although he is the youngest of the three brothers, behaves like the eldest, organizing the details of the tour, redoing the set list, making everything happen…and no one appreciates him for that. “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie” is a movie about white people’s issues.
Still, it’s all part of the light guilty pleasure. The Jonas Brothers, in their way of middle-American dudes with all-grown-up purity rings, are likeable, partly because they’re always poking holes in each other’s egos. And the film wants to be silly and a little crazy, like in the episode where they find themselves on board a private plane and the pilot, after trying to take sexy selfies of himself, finds himself knocked out on the ground, with the autopilot mechanism turned off. It takes a crash landing in the snowy woods and having to yell at a pack of wolves for the Jonas Brothers to rediscover their love for each other.
They’re all pretty comfortable in front of the camera, but for me the clear standout actor is Nick Jonas. What he does have, unlike his brothers, is the ability to hold an audience curious and intrigued, even when he’s doing nothing – it’s just a vibe, a sense of what’s going on behind his lean, shifty face. I love the Jonas Brothers and I hope they continue, especially if they ever get together to make another song like “Sucker,” their 2019 hit that’s the best song they’ve ever recorded. (They play it live during the closing credits.) But at this point, as “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie” more or less acknowledges, this is a band of old guys. The film reaffirms their place in the pop firmament, but it also made me think: If they ever start to get too old for this, Nick Jonas might have the big screen waiting for him.
