★
A medieval English knight is magically transported to the present day where he falls for a high school science teacher who is disillusioned by love.
Classification: 12
In the midst of Netflix's latest holiday monstrosity, the time-travelling knight played by Josh Whitehouse finds himself enthralled by the "magic picture box that brings merry" or as we call it "a television". It's a classic fish out of water situation, the brave Sir Cole learns about modern culture through the television to make his transition into the new world easier and have him make amusing comments or faux pas' based on what he saw. While he picks up some modern slang displayed in some lifeless awkward scenes, later on, the most striking piece of this sequence is the fact that Holiday in the Wild is what Cole is watching, Netflix blatantly hawking their previous terrible Christmas film in their newest terrible Christmas film. Basically telling the audience to go fuck themselves with the lazy and thoughtless process in which this collection of audio and visuals were formed but also a stark and important reminder that The Knight Before Christmas does not feature any elephants and therefore has no value. In a perfect moment of clarity, it is clear that there is no artistic motivation to any of this as The Knight Before Christmas is one of the worst audiovisual outputs of the year for I refuse to acknowledge this as a film.
Films require conflict, obstacles and motivation to move forward, Monika Mitchell's story has none of these beyond the inciting incident of Cole being sent to the future by a witch to go on a quest. After that, however, everything's fine and works itself out almost immediately, Vanessa Hudgens' character Brooke has no issue allowing a man clad in medieval armour and armed with a broadsword into her home after hitting him with her car. Nor does the police officer who arrives on the scene, in fact, he would like to recruit Cole to the police force, which is what one does when encountering an individual that you believe in injured and possibly deranged. Only Brooke's sister has an issue with this but drops it when sees how attractive Cole is, no one seems to care about anything revolving around the inciting incident of Cole time travelling. Its all an illogical collection of scenes about two seemingly attractive people developing romantic feelings for one another despite no chemistry and shoehorning in pathetic messaging about Christmas spirit.
There's nothing truly festive, exciting or sweet about The Knight Before Christmas, it's incredibly boring by how it does nothing with its premise. The old witch that sends Cole to the future isn't a villain of any kind, there is no nefarious plot that the heroes must foil to save Christmas, this is just cheap sub-par below Hallmark quality dogshit. Mitchell's direction is entirely aimless, each scene meandering from one set up to the next with little consequence in between, Whitehouse and Hudgens have no chemistry together and their story has no basis in any tangible form of reality. Not because of the intended fairytale feel, Cole seeks to learn how to become a "true knight" which coincidently means falling in love with a woman from the future for some reason but because Mitchell has this story live inside of that fabricated imitation existence of shitty Christmas films. Its where this steaming pile belongs but its impossible to take anything seriously or get invested the character's lack of story because of lifeless and cringy dialogue and subsequent lifeless and cringy performances.
Whether its another example of Netflix's algorithm going rogue or the company has gone mad with power in the wake of Roma and Irishman success and will now greenlight whatever collection of words makes its way into their inbox The Knight Before Christmas is some of the worst the service has to offer. Even if you're a masochist who enjoys watching terrible films, there is no enjoyment to be found with this, The Knight Before Christmas is just a void of fake snow, phoney acting and atrocious, despicable attempted storytelling. By the metrics that I follow on this site, every film gets a score between one and five stars but there is no artistic merit to whatever this is, so the justification of the score comes down to two things; the camera was in focus and the audio mix was respectable. I could see and hear everything that was happening in The Knight Before Christmas although in hindsight that was probably to my detriment.
Director: #MonikaMitchell
Release Date: November 21st 2019
Available Exclusively on Netflix
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images and Synopsis from the Internet Movie Database
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