Stan’s endearingly daft Christmas Ransom is a jolly addition to the canon of criminal holiday movies that Stephen A Russell has coined a genre term for. Read his review of the festive caper here.
When it comes to composing the naughty and nice list, there’s a long and joyously chaotic tradition of feloniously funny Christmas capers that we’ll dub crimiNoelles. Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov and Aldo Ray play prison breakers on the run on Christmas Eve in an early classic of the genre We’re No Angels, debuting in 1955. Bruce Willis blew up as an off-duty New York cop forced to take down a terrorist cell run by a hilariously accented Alan Rickman during the holiday season in Los Angeles in 1989’s Die Hard.
Two years later, Macaulay Culkin championed the trend as a forgotten kid with a fiendish knack for inventing crim-bashing traps in Home Alone. For all the mayhem they unwrapped, they were also undeniably wholesome in a farked-up way.
Stan’s Christmas Ransom is an endearingly daft addition to this chaotic good company. The directorial feature debut of At Home Alone Together’s Adele Vuko, she’s working from a screenplay by Elliot Vella, Gretel Vella and Timothy Walker, the trio who penned Stan’s previous seasonal gift to the crimiNoelle tradition, A Sunburnt Christmas. Comedian-turned-actor Matt Okine stars as Derrick, owner of struggling toy shop Harrington and Sons, about to go under despite Christmas carols heralding their busiest time of year.
Estranged from his sister Terri, the considerably richer head honcho of a video game company played by Wentworth escapee Vivienne Awosoga, Derrick instead leans on his employees as a found family of sorts. That includes Paper Planes lead Ed Oxenbould, who has basically grown up on our screens, as above-and-beyond retail jockey Pete, plus the always effervescent Miranda Tapsell as heavily pregnant but still no-nonsense security guard Gladys.
They appear to be alone in the store with Derrick after closing time on Christmas Eve. Until, that is, two Kevin McCallister-like kids (Tahlia Sturzaker as Brady and Evan Stanhope as Wombat) pop up out of a ball pit and proceed to steal the star off a Christmas tree with the aid of a drone.
Landing them in hot water with a cranky Gladys, their naughty list ranking is soon supplanted by gun-toting crims who hold up the joint. Geneviève Lemon, great in Here Out West, has a ball as the maniacally cackling Nan, whose grand plan amounts to extorting money so she can “be chugging a beer in Bali on Boxing Day.” Bump actor Bridie McKim is her reluctant accomplice and granddaughter, Shez, whom Pete falls in love with at first sight—replete with a Cher-level pop video hair-flowing-in-a-fan moment.
This, even though she ties him and Derrick up with suspiciously strong tinsel. It’s left to Gladys and the brats in her detention to save the day, with or without the help of her fireman ex-fling Greg (Chai Hansen), who doesn’t yet know he’s the baby-daddy.
What follows is predictable enough, including comic pratfalls, fart jokes, a smoking barbecue and broken waters, but it doesn’t have to reinvent the Christmas cheese wheel. That’s the joy of these barmy, bogan-charm holiday movies. We all know the goodies will get out of it unscathed, probably bringing at least one baddie over to the bright side of life along the way. They’re purposefully wrapped with cheesy feel-good endings tied up in a neat bow.
Okine has adorably dorky energy to spare, with Tapsell a pleasure as ever. The rest of the cast are uniformly up for a good time, too, including Vuko, who also appears on screen as a truly clueless cop easily distracted from the criminal-catching job at hand by blue light disco beats. Daggy as all hell, Christmas Ransom still manages to squish in a couple of nice touches. Like when Pete gormlessly asks Shez if she has a limp because she was popped in the leg during a previous stick-up, only for her to shoot back, unbothered, “I have cerebral palsy, you dingbat.” It’s a nice nod to actor McKim’s lived experience as a person with disability.
Sassy and silly in equal measure, the final act showdown also packs plenty of inventive Home Alone-inspired, toy-deployed takedowns into the frenetically sweet and nuts mix. It’s all chased with a blooper reel over the end credits that goes down like a particularly loaded eggnog.
Christmas movies, even of the crimiNoelle variety, aren’t meant to challenge us. They’re the ultimate comfort food delivered en masse with a cheeky kiss under the mistletoe, fizzing with a candy cane sugar rush of the warm and fuzzies. For that reason, Christmas Ransom is the perfect Kris Kringle to wrap the year.
