In “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie,” a synthetic holiday trifle whose chief asset is that it knows and even winks at how much it’s a synthetic holiday trifle, one of the more amusing scenes has the Jonas Brothers showing up at a hotel in Amsterdam to see a cabaret performance by Ethan, an old enemy of Nick Jonas’s portrayed by Andrew Barth Feldman. It seems that the two had been in a Broadway show together — a musical version of “Home Alone,” with Ethan as the Macaulay Culkin character and Nick cast as the dad. Ethan felt patronized by the pop star, and the two didn’t get along.
The reason the Jonases have shown up is that they want to hitch a Christmas ride home on Ethan’s private plane. (Their own tour jet blew up, because…well, we’ll get to that in a minute. It has something to do with meeting Santa Claus in a bar.) Ethan, scarcely hiding his contempt, calls Nick up onstage, where the two perform a duet from the show, a song that’s at once a pretty power ballad and pretty awful (“I will never leave you home alone ag-a-a-ain!”). But it’s just plausible enough to give you a chuckle. Then, at the song’s end, Ethan’s contempt for Nick comes pouring out, and Andrew Barth Feldman plays this with just enough mean-boy panache to raise your chuckle to a giggle.
If you like Christmas movies the way I do, you’ve seen the genre evolve, in a major way, over the last decade. It used to be that we got a handful of them each year in movie theaters. The small screen was reserved for what I thought of as Hallmark-type TV-movies, including the occasional kitsch Christmas cookie like “A Very Brady Christmas” (1988). But streaming changed all that. The small-screen Christmas movie is now an industry, with dozens of feel-good holiday entertainments coming out of the processor, almost all of them some combination of the following: wholesome, silly, romantic, artificial, fizzy, reverent, and too brightly lit, with the Christmas cheer poured on like eggnog spiked with even thicker eggnog.
So it says something that “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie” feels like a disposable stocking stuffer even when compared to the G-rated Christmas-globe world of made-for-streaming holiday fare.
The movie casts the Jonas Brothers as genially stylized versions of themselves, and it sticks them in the middle of a “Can we make it home for Christmas?” plot that’s like “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” made on a streaming budget. As the movie opens, in London, Will Ferrell is taking his family to see the final night of the Jonas Brothers’ latest tour (the joke is that Ferrell loves the Jonases more than he does his own children). As they come offstage, we see that the three have been playing together for so long now (20 years!) that the thrill is kind of gone. They’re not teenage pop stars anymore. They’re grown men with families who’ve come to take their career, and each other, for granted.
That might be just what you’d expect. But Santa Claus (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), appearing incognito as a short-white-bearded eccentric who happens to be sitting next to Joe at a bar, gets an earful of Joe’s troubles and puts an instructional curse on the brothers: They will not be able to make it home for Christmas until they rediscover their bond and start appreciating each other again. Which they will do over the course of 80 minutes of haphazard road-trip-through-Europe adventure.
Some of “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie” is standard holiday-special treacle, with all the dramatic richness of a fake fireplace log. But it’s broken up by musical numbers that go down easy, since a lot of them, as composed by Justin Tranter (and sung with sweet vibrance by the Jonases), come off like Michael Bublé heartwarmers. A few of them are staged with a wink; during a production number set in a train station, the brothers do a double take after the dancers perform a hands-under-the-knee homage to a move that became a meme from “Camp Rock 2.” And there’s a romance that wastes no time falling into cringe terrain: On the train, Joe, the swarthy womanizer of the group (he’s the only one who isn’t married with kids), just happens to run into…his old childhood crush (Chloe Bennet)! Who is now a thoracic heart surgeon! And has just broken up with someone!
The cringe factor almost works for the movie. Kevin, the one who has never left New Jersey, is the nerdish Ringo of the group, and he’s sitting on something he needs to tell the rest of them. We think he’s quitting the band, but it’s really just that he wants the chance to sing a lead vocal. And Nick, though he’s the youngest of the three brothers, acts like the oldest, organizing the tour details, redoing the set list, making it all happen…and no one appreciates him for this. “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie” is a very white people problems movie.
Yet that’s all part of the mild guilty pleasure of it. The Jonas Brothers, in their straight-arrow Middle American dudes-with-purity-rings-all-grown-up way, are likable, in part because they’re always poking holes in each other’s egos. And the movie is willing to be daft and a bit loopy, as in the episode where they find themselves aboard a private plane and the pilot, after trying to take sexy selfies of himself, winds up knocked out cold on the floor, with the automatic-pilot mechanism turned off. It will take crash-landing in the snowy woods, and having to scream at a pack of wolves, to make the Jonas Brothers rediscover their love for each other.
They’re all quite comfortable in front of the camera, but to me the clear stand-out as an actor is Nick Jonas. What he has, that his brothers don’t, is the ability to hold an audience, curious and intrigued, even when he’s doing nothing — it’s just a vibe, a sense of things going on behind his lean, sly visage. I like the Jonas Brothers and hope they continue on, especially if they ever get it together to do another song like “Sucker,” their 2019 hit that’s the best track they ever recorded. (They perform it in concert during the closing credits.) But at this point, as “A Very Jonas Christmas Movie” more or less acknowledges, they’re an oldies act. The movie reaffirms their place in the pop firmament, but it also made me think: If they ever do start to get too old for this, Nick Jonas might have the big screen waiting for him.
