JCDaydream The biggest mistake made with this movie was calling it a comedy. There are funny moments, but a comedy it ain't. It's a drama more than anything and a reasonably good one. Nothing overly original but it was well done and held my attention and enjoyment for the entire story. Something that is very rare these days.

brungardriley First thing I'd like to say is that I tend to enjoy most movies. If a film is able keep my attention, and overpowers the modern trend of checking one's phone, then I almost always consider it a smashing success. El Camino Christmas is an enjoyable yet surprisingly dark dramatic thriller. If you watched the Netflix trailer then you may find the tone of the overall film less comedic then advertised. But that does not surprise me though, because most the the Netflix trailers are horrible or incredibly misleading. I going to guess that director David E. Talbert is a Quentin Tarantino fan and the films (Reservoir Dogs/The Hateful Eight) really helped inspire this project. I was going into the film expecting the whole thing to be a Bottle Movie but was pleasantly surprised when I realized it wasn't. The first 45 minutes to an hour of the film is mostly set-up that helps establish just exactly who/what all the main characters are. Then the rest of the film takes place within a single location with the occasional cut away to the other leads who are located directly outside of Vicinte's Liquor Mart (the bottle).Pros: + The cast is absolutely stacked. Kurtwood Smith was great playing Red Foreman as a grumpy sherif in charge of babysitting the standard clueless Dax Shepard (this due provides the majority of the comedy). The young leads, Luke Grimes and Michelle Mylett, both hold their own incredibly well. LetterKenny fans will be happy to see Mylett getting more work, I imagine she'll be doing more things after this. Vincent D'Onofrio has truly perfected the art of the antagonist and shines again as a drunk cop. And to round it out Tim Allen played my favorite character, the drunk veteran Charlie, who loves to slur his way through Christmas songs while sipping on beers and bumping into strangers. I'm probably showing my age here but Tim Allen has only ever been Santa Claus and Buzz Lightyear to me so watching him play a very rated R role was incredibly refreshing.+ The plot has a Fargo-ish vibe and once the story got going I couldn't take my attention off the screen.+ Semi-modern-day-Western that replaces a 'Stranger on a Horse' entering a town, with a 'Stranger in an El Camino' entering a town.Cons: Jessica Alba was just there. She looks great but didn't really add anything. And they definitely made her pregnant just to use the "baby on Christmas" cliche.I am personally not the biggest fan of overly 'happy endings' so this may not be a con for others. But I felt the conclusion was somewhat unrealistic but it was still satisfying and hardly a con.Overall if I had to give El Camino Christmas some parent's I'd say its the offspring of No Country for Old Men & Die Hard. I'm a sucker for the 'wrong-place-wrong-time' plot driven stories so this one will most likely become a favorite of mine and maybe even a Christmas regular.

JaynaB American cinema doesn't do ensemble that well very often, and it frequently gets punished at the box office, as well as by viewers and by reviewers, for even trying. This film pulls together a low-key cast with an intelligent script and ends up as a quirky, darkly humorous drama that unfolds over Christmas Eve. The characters are a motley crew of misfits and losers, stereotypical small-towners on the surface, with the obligatory pregnant woman arriving as a tv reporter from the big city. The actors, many of whom we're used to seeing in bigger roles where they tend to take up a lot of screen, give dialed-back performances that allow - even expect - the audience to fill in the subtext. And there's a fair bit of subtext lying behind and between the stripped-down dialogue: about power and corruption, war and trauma, family and gender roles, the nature of life's choices and the cold reality of death. This could be done as a stage play and it would be getting rave reviews that mentioned Tennessee Williams. I'm not used to seeing so much packed into a contemporary, for-the-masses movie, and I'm plainly not alone in that. The poor reviews may be due in part to an un-sparing execution that's cutting too close to the tragi-comic reality of the modern American south.

AudioFileZ I thought this was going to be a crime comedy. The comedy is nowhere to be found. So let's call it a drama. It fails here too because the story seems so empty for over 90% of the film. At the last it makes an attempt to tie it all together in a dramatic way quite late...to no avail.. It's simply too empty for too long with too little too late. I wonder how this got the nod at all for a production. It is that senseless. No one really delivers a convincing performance here with so little to inspire. A complete mess I'd say with a ridiculous coda to the ending. I want my 90-minutes back.