Review: Not even Dolly Parton could save Christmas on the Square

Not even our deep affection for Dolly Parton can save Christmas on the Square, which is campy, by the numbers, and painfully unoriginal in the worst way possible.

Warning: This review contains spoilers for Christmas on the Square. 

We’ll be honest. If you pitch a movie as “Dolly Parton plays a magical singing angel in a movie about saving Christmas,” you have our attention. But not even our love for the queen of country herself is deep enough to redeem Christmas on the Square, an abomination of a holiday film that is devoid of all charm and originality.

The Netflix original film stars Christine Baranski as Regina Fuller, a wealthy business executive(?) who returns to her hometown the week before Christmas to announce that she’s sold the entire town to be bulldozed and turned into a massive shopping center by the “Cheetah” mall corporation. The town’s inhabitants, including hairstylist Margeline (Jennifer Lewis), Pastor Christian (Josh Segarra), and bar owner Mack (Matthew Johnson) rail against their sudden eviction, but it’s with the help of an angel named Angel (Dolly Parton) that Regina sees the error of her ways and, of course, reverses her decision.

As far as Christmas movie plots go, Christmas on the Square‘s could not be more by the numbers. It ticks off quite literally every bad trope or commonality in the holiday genre, and not in a parodic or satiric kind of way — it just seems like the writers of the film genuinely set out to make a holiday flick with the most unoriginal plot in existence. Right off the bat, the film opens with a musical number that looks like the type of performance you see when Broadway musicals do a song or two during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

The choreography is classic campy Broadway, the lyrics are uninspired, and worst of all, the majority of the actors don’t even have strong singing voices. The result is a series of musical numbers, each more embarrassing than the last. We’re glad that these actors had work for a few months, but the end result isn’t even something we would feel proud putting on our resume. The production value is just so low, and the content of each musical number so dry, that the songs bleed together.

There’s also no real reason for the film itself to be a musical. The majority of the songs could be cut from the film entirely or replaced with dialogue and probably save the production team a few million dollars and weeks of choreography. If this is the quality standard that Netflix is coming out with in terms of movie musicals, we should all be worried about The Prom, because the numbers in Christmas on the Square were a hot mess.

What’s even worse, though, are the cookie-cutter characters that populate this purportedly charming town. Leading the pack is, of course, Baranski’s Regina. She is, unsurprisingly, the most palatable character. Baranski has the kind of charisma that makes even the most utterly terrible of characters intriguing, which is what’s happening here. However, outside of Baranski’s charm and presence, Regina is very much a nothing character. Besides a few quippy one-liners every now and again, she’s basically just a poor man’s Scrooge.

Parton plays the creatively named angel, Angel, who isn’t quite even a character — just a plot device shaped like Dolly Parton that floats down on a cloud every now and again when the story needs to get going. Her trainee angel, Felicity (Jeanine Mason), has a little more personality to her. She’s awkward and sometimes charming, but most of her comedy falls flat.

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The only other worthwhile character is the town’s resident adorable child, Violet (Selah Kimbro Jones), who has more personality and energy in her tiny body than the rest of the cast put together. We wish her character had been introduced earlier, instead of wasting time with the rest of the communion wafer “characters” that fill out the cast.

The most egregiously dull supporting player is Treat Williams as Carl Pellam, Regina’s old high school flame. He could be removed entirely with no change to the film’s end result, and he has no presence whatsoever when he’s onscreen — with a signing voice even worse.

Also uninspired are Pastor Christian (yes, that’s really his name) and his wife Jenna (Mary Lane Haskell) who are glorified extras until Christian suddenly becomes relevant to the plot late in the game, when it’s revealed that he is actually Regina’s long-lost son? Lewis is also present, and try as she might to infuse her character with her signature personality, she too could be cut without consequence and save us 15 minutes of screen time.

In the end, Christmas on the Square feels like the lowest common denominator of Christmas movies. The songs are terrible, the characters are flat, and despite a few noteworthy stars attached to the project, it would take a Christmas miracle for us to go anywhere near this film again.

Have you seen Christmas on the Square? What’s your favorite Christmas musical? Sound off in the comments below.