This year, Netflix expanded their holiday catalogue with a slew of movies, and you’d be forgiven if you didn’t notice any of them. I’m not sure I would’ve even heard of Jingle Jangle or last year’s Klaus if people who watched them hadn’t sung their praises directly to me. On an endlessly scrolling website populated by hundreds of other films that are algorithmically sorted and shown to people who just finished binging an eight season-long show, it’s hard to stand out. Rather than try to make a name for itself, however, the recently-released rom com, Operation Christmas Drop, goes out of its way to not stand out, to not be memorable, and to not have an interesting plot behind its premise. All of that allows it to fit right in with the other original productions sitting on Netflix’s shelves, but it certainly doesn’t make it a good film.
The story follows a congressional aid, Erica (Kat Graham), who’s sent to the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam to ascertain if it should be shuttered as part of a recent Base Realignment and Closure initiative by congress. Determined to win her heart over and preserve the tradition of Operation Christmas Drop, an annual training mission dating back to 1952 where planes drop supplies to communities on Micronesian islands, Captain Andrew Jantz (Alexander Ludwig) takes her on a guide through the base and its surrounding community to prove that it should remain open and show her there’s more to life there that meets the eye.
One might assume that Operation Christmas Drop gets its premise across more gracefully than I, but that assumption would be incorrect. In its opening minutes characters all but spell out the stakes in the same way a writer might pitch the story itself, with quite a few more words than a simple plot synopsis. This explanatory tendency does prove to be an ongoing problem with the movie, though the issue with it here is that it exposes the shaky call to action for Erica. While it is laughable that congress would be willing to slash military spending in any capacity, especially since the last BRAC was in 2005, the confusing part is why she’s being sent to the base in the first place. Her boss claims she wants her to have boots on the ground to see what this “Operation Christmas Drop” is really about, but she never learns more than what you could find in a simple Google search anyway. One shouldn’t expect intricate storytelling from what is clearly a Hallmark-esque movie, but this setup just serves to make either Erica look incompetent or her boss look like a terrible manager.
Since the plot clearly cannot stand up on its own, the film must rely on the relationship between its titular characters. Both of the star actors give charming performances, with Graham managing to pull off a cocky yet emotionally tinged confidence that makes Erica slightly more memorable. However, neither her nor Ludwig have the chops to save the paint-by-numbers script they’re reading—which has them trading predictable and uninteresting quips while spiraling further and further towards being romantic partners without proper development. This movie almost seems like its actually just trying to portray a fast-growing friendship between two people from different walks of life until you are blindsided by an embrace that ends just short of a first kiss.
An iffy premise and shoddy character development aside, there isn’t much else that’s remarkable about Operation Christmas Drop. The score sounds like royalty-free music for Youtubers with a zero-dollar budget, apart from the occasional pop Christmas song. The direction from Martin Wood often emphasizes the natural beauty surrounding the base (the location of which is almost exclusively referred to as “the island” and not, as one would hope, Guam) through some key landscape shots, however, it becomes jarring when later scenes take place on clearly artificial outdoor sets. The moment-to-moment writing, despite having some charming moments, is overall quite didactic, with conversations sometimes sounding like narrated Wikipedia articles that make the film feel as monotonous as the report Erica’s making.
Despite its storytelling being lackluster and its take on contemporary relations between the military and congress being way off base, there’s a certain positivity to Operation Christmas Drop that I can’t seem to shake. It’s obviously trying to be a very feel-good story, and considering its subject matter, I was primed to be skeptical of that, but it puts so much work into giving you a happy ending that by disliking it I felt almost like the congresswoman trying to shut down the base. I don’t blame anyone who wants a movie that isn’t cynical or sad, especially this year. However, Operation Christmas Drop just can’t cobble up enough to be even an average romantic comedy, and in the end is simply another movie sitting in Netflix’s library.
2/5 STARS