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With: George Lopez, Emily Tosta, Jack Kilmer, Mariana Treviño, Alma Martinez, Romy Peniche, Francisco Carrillo, Jairo A. Orozco, Justice Alexander Mojica, Anthony Zuniga
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Written by: Ezequiel Martinez Jr.
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Directed by: Angel Gracia
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive material and language
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Running Time: 81
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Date: 12/01/2023
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How the Gringo Stole Christmas (2023)
Jingle Smells
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
A surefire contender for one of the worst Christmas movies ever made, this painfully unfunny comedy is filled with characters and behaviors so thoughtless and misguided that it's flat-out insulting.
Nerdy video game maker Leif (Jack Kilmer) plans a romantic island getaway for himself and his girlfriend Claudia (Emily Tosta). Unfortunately, before he can tell her, her aggressive father Bennie (George Lopez) announces his own plans: she will be coming home to East L.A. for Christmas. Claudia decides to surprise her family with her White boyfriend, which does not go over well. What follows is several days of chaos, including attempts to cook a chicken and a dangerous soccer game. It begins to look as if Leif may not get a chance to spring his own surprise: a marriage proposal.
How the Gringo Stole Christmas is an admirable attempt to create a holiday classic for a specific cultural group, but, unfortunately, it's as if the filmmakers barely even tried. The situation is already pretty stale (see everything from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? to Meet the Parents), and the filmmakers have nothing to add to it. The Bennie character acts like a lunatic throughout, and the Leif character makes all the usual rookie mistakes.
The humor, if it can be called that, includes a few typical slapstick moments (the aforementioned chicken and soccer sequences), but the rest of it is beyond stupid. It's worse than stupid… it's ignorant. The movie tries to conjure laughs with characters who pay no attention to anything going on around them, as if each character existed only in his or her own void.
Perhaps most perplexing is the decision to include a Greek Chorus of three vatos who hang around near a car parked across the street, watching all the action, dancing, and throwing out their own nonsensical one-liners. Certainly Latin audiences hoping for some holiday cheer can do better than How the Gringo Stole Christmas; the far superior Nothing Like the Holidays is recommended instead.
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