Christmas Karma (PG) Film Review

If Charles Dickens were still alive today, he would have made a fortune from the plethora of Christmas entertainment based on his ever popular story A Christmas Carol.  

The latest is writer/director Gurinder Chadha’s Anglo Bollywood musical version, in which Scrooge is Eshaan Sood (Kunal Nayyar), a rich but mean middle aged businessman in financial services, who hates Christmas – he is after all Hindu. 

From the opening scenes of the film, I can’t say I blame him.  London is full of people in Christmas costumes and silly hats singing and dancing to Yuletide ditties that embrace rap, grime and other and worst of all there’s Danny Dyer as a gabby Cockney London cab driver who never stops singing.  Not surprising then that when Snood gets to his office and finds the staff partying, he sacks the lot of them, apart from Bob Cratchett (Leo Suter), whom we’re going need later for story purposes. 

That night Snood is visited by his dead former partner Marley (a weirdly disguised Hugh Bonneville), who alerts him to the imminent arrival of the three Christmas ghosts. 

The first is Christmas Past in the form of Eva Longoria, looking like she’s dropping in from the Mexican Day of the Dead.  However once she’s got her sing song over and we go into Christmas Past, the film takes an upturn. 

Sood and his family are among the Asians who were expelled by from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972 and exiled to the UK.   This part of the film – the beauties of the Kenyan flora and fauna, the small boy torn away from his best friend and his dog and the hostile reaction of the British natives – all this is genuinely affecting, as is the later story of young Eshaan (Bilal Hasna), who loses his first love through his growing love of money.  

However the film then takes a turn for the sugary cliché, when we join Bob Cratchett, Tiny Tim and family, celebrating their impoverished Christmas not, as one might expect, in a mould infested flat on a rundown council estate but living in a very pretty and well maintained Victorian terrace in a house, which must be worth a million or more in today’s market.  

There are though some more bright moments in the film – Billy Porter as the Ghost of Christmas Present leads the company in a rousing bit of gospel music and the whole thing ends with a jolly, Bollywood style Christmas knees up at the fairground. 

Despite its faults this could well become a Christmas tv regular – or even a seasonal stage musical.   But the story I really want Chadha to tell is one based on her own experience of being one of the Ugandan Asians, who came here in exile, were greeted with the initial hostility now reserved for the boat people, but who went on, like herself, to make such important contribution to our culture and economy.