Unaccompanied Minors

The Christmas movie had somewhat of a comeback in 2003 when the triple threat attack of Elf, Bad Santa and Love Actually impressed both audiences and critics. It gave Hollywood the impetus to once again 'bless' the festive season with other Christmas themed movies ever since.

This year has been no different. Already we've endured The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and Deck the Halls. Now comes Unaccompanied Minors, a film which can be most crassly described as Home Alone at an airport.

The film sees a group of mismatched kids all traveling alone on Christmas eve, also known as Unaccompanied Minors, also known as UMs. There's the scruffy kid Spencer (Dyllan Christopher) charged with looking after his sister, the spoiled rich brat Grace (Gina Mantegna), the rule-following geek Charlie (Tyler James Williams), the tomboy from the wrong side of the tracks Donna (Quinn Shephard) and the quiet loner "Beef" (Brett Kelly).

When a blizzard causes all of their flights to be cancelled, the UMs are sent to a holding cell, a manic room where all the kids are kept. The group decide they must leave and they make a run for it, with the bad-tempered manager and his beleaguered assistant hot on their tracks. The UMs cause chaos across the airport as they make a break for freedom.

Now, let me get this clear. I have a huge tolerance for Christmas movies. When it gets to December, I'll watch and enjoy pretty much anything as long as it has a festive theme. I mean I even enjoyed Christmas with the Kranks for Christ's sake. But Unaccompanied Minors managed the impossible – it broke my Christmas spirit.

It's a story which has plenty of potential and delivered in a warm, glossy package, it's hard to understand exactly what went so disastrously wrong. The blame, in my opinion, would go squarely with the writers. That's right, it took two screenwriters to come up with this juvenile comedy. Two writers to alternate jokes where people get kneed in the balls with jokes where people fall over themselves.

It could be argued that I'm way out of the target demographic for the movie and okay so I quite blatantly am but at a time when children's fare includes films such as Finding Nemo and Elf, it really shouldn't matter. I can't imagine a child of any age, raised on films of a similar ilk, who would find anything in this lazy comedy that would provide any form of entertainment.

The plot, if you could even call it that, is tied together by the thinnest of threads and in order to keep the kids together, the writers give them all a mission to get to Spencer's sister. Quite why any of them would actually give a shit about someone they've mostly never met is never explained. We go directly from them hating each other

to them calling each other 'family' with little to no character development in-between.

What is interesting about the movie is how painfully modern it wants to be. For example all of the kids are from divorced parents, leading them to decide that they'd much rather be stuck at some airport than at home with their evil divorced folks. Secondly, Spencer's dad is driving to pick him up but he's a conservationist so drives an 'eco-diesel' car. Which is the reason why it takes him so long to get there. He eventually has to decide between his kids and between his love for the environment. Puke.

The kids themselves are all crudely drawn stereotypes, with only Tyler James Williams, best known from one of the CW's only watched shows Everybody Hates Chris, proving to be an engaging screen presence. The adults are of course all foolish simpletons, falling over repeatedly and acting like buffoons. In modern-day America would the security really be so lax at a major airport? Wouldn't the kids have already been repeatedly shot in the back and/or tortured?

What's depressing is that the director Paul Feig created the acclaimed TV series Freaks and Geeks, plus directed episodes of Weeds and The Office. Somewhere in the crossover from award-winning comedy to unfunny children's trash he must have lost his comic timing and general sanity.

Even an undiscerning kids audience would demand better than Unaccompanied Minors this holiday season. With the competition so high, it's gonna struggle. As kids films cater more and more to the adults as well, a film as dumb and graceless as this feels horribly old-fashioned. It's Christmas and I really wanted to just sit back and think of Santa but all I saw was red.

Movie Grade: D

Synopsis:

It’s Christmas Eve and five kids have just been snowed in at the airport — and there isn’t a parent in sight. Unaccompanied Minors follows awkward Spencer (Dyllan Christopher), rich-girl Grace (Gina Mantegna), tomboy Donna (Quinn Shephard), geeky Charlie (Tyler James Williams) and bashful Beef (Brett Kelly) as they try to outwit a disgruntled airport official (Lewis Black) and reunite with their families. Using “borrowed” golf-carts, a canoe on a snow hill and the help of a reluctant flight attendant (Wilmer Valderrama), these kids are about to prove the holidays aren’t about where you are, but who you’re with.