Champagne Problems Critique – The Streaming Giant’s Newest Christmas Romantic Comedy Falls Flat.

Without wanting to come across as the Grinch, it’s hard not to bemoan the premature arrival of holiday films prior to the Thanksgiving holiday. While the weather cools, it seems too soon to fully indulge in the platform’s annual feast of low-cost festive entertainment.

Similar to American chocolates that no longer include genuine cocoa, Netflix’s Christmas films are relied upon for their brand of badness. They provide predictable elements – familiar actors, low budgets, fake snow, and unbelievable plots. At worst, these films are unmemorable disasters; in the best scenarios, they are forgettable fun.

Champagne Problems, the newest holiday concoction, disappears into the vast middle of the forgettable spectrum. Helmed by Mark Steven Johnson, whose previous romantic comedy was utterly forgettable, this film feels like cheap bubbly – appropriately flat and situational.

It begins with what appears to be an AI-generated ad for supermarket sparkling wine. This ad is actually the pitch of the main character, played by the actress, to her colleagues at the Roth Group. The protagonist is the construction paper cut-out of a professional female – overlooked, constantly on her device, and driven to the harm of her private world. When her superior sends her to Paris to close a deal over the holidays, her sibling insists she spend an evening in the city to live for herself.

Of course, Paris is the perfect place to pull someone from Google Maps, even when the city is covered in unconvincing digital snowfall. At a absurdly cutesy bookshop, Sydney meet-cutes with the male lead, who pulls her away from her device. As demanded by the genre, Sydney initially resists this ideal guy for frivolous excuses.

Equally as expected are the movie mechanics that proceed at abrupt quarter turns, reflecting the rotation of aging champagne bottles in the cellars of the family vineyard. The twist? The love interest is the heir to Chateau Cassel, hesitant to manage it and bitter toward his father for putting it up for sale. In perhaps the movie’s most salient contribution to romantic comedies, Henri is highly critical of corporate buyouts. The problem? The heroine sincerely believes she’s not dismantling this family-owned company for profit, vying against three caricatures: a severe French grand dame, a rigid German, and an out-of-touch wealthy man.

The twist? Her skeevy coworker the office rival shows up unannounced. The core? The two leads gaze longingly at each other in festive sleepwear, despite a vast chasm in economic worldview.

The upside and downside is that none of this lingers longer than a short-lived thrill on an empty stomach. There’s a lack of real absorbent filler – the lead actress, most famous for her part in Friday Night Lights, gives a merely adequate performance, superficially pleasant and gestures of care, more maternal than love interest material. Tom Wozniczka offers exactly the dollop of Gallic appeal with mild self-torture and nothing more. The gimmicks are not amusing, the romance is inoffensive, and the ending is straightforward.

For all its waxing poetic on the exclusivity of sparkling wine, no one is pretending it is anything but a mainstream product. The flaws are also the things to like. It’s fair to say an expert’s opinion about it a minor issue.

• The Holiday Film can be streamed on Netflix.