Starry cast, including Felicity Jones and Chloë Grace Moretz, can’t save misfiring cross between Home Alone and The Family Stone

If you’ve already over-indulged in Netflix’s brand of cheap and, overwhelmingly, cheerless Christmas movies this season, then Amazon has something a little meatier to add to your plate. Like Netflix, it also has more than enough tinnily made Hallmark ripoffs (step forward, Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy), but it’s also aiming a little higher with Oh. What. Fun. It’s a more robustly made attempt to recall something we used to see on the big rather than small screen with a cast to match, a starry cross between Home Alone and The Family Stone with an all-new soundtrack from some unusually upper-tier artists.

Given the low budget and even lower ambition of the genre, it’s easy to be blinded by the names attached. The film is directed by Michael Showalter, the trusted hand behind films like The Big Sick, Wet Hot American Summer and The Idea of You! It stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Felicity Jones, Jason Schwartzman, Danielle Brooks and Chloë Grace Moretz! There are new songs from Fleet Foxes, Gwen Stefani and Sharon Van Etten, among others! Enough experience might have shown us that even the most talented people do not tend to make the greatest films, but there’s something about the sheer effort being poured into this one that feels notable as others have seemingly given up trying. Could actual fun be on the Christmas cards?