When I first saw the announcement for this movie, I told myself I wouldn’t watch it, but here we are. Not only did I watch A Very Jonas Christmas Movie—Morgan, Abby, and I made it our first Christmas movie of the season.

Unsurprisingly, this movie was underwhelming given its Disney Channel-level budget and writing. Even though I love the Jonas Brothers, their acting skills weren’t exactly high-caliber, and they weren’t helped at all by the mounds of poor, cringy dialogue. There was also very little novelty in the story, to the point where they even acknowledged the situation they were in was overly “Christmas movie-y”. I didn’t need Elf-level comedy or It’s a Wonderful Life-level drama, but Disney: you’re better than this.

One of the movie’s saving graces—other than its handful of entertaining cameos, from Jesse Tyler Ferguson to Andrew Barth Feldman—was the music. Was every song great? No, but they did provide a breath of fresh air in this otherwise stale narrative. Some of the songs were pretty good, actually—both “Coming Home This Christmas” and “Time” were legitimately good songs, and “Home Alone” was pretty funny because of Feldman. It’s no surprise that these songs, good or bad, were catchy—Justin Tranter wrote them, which was one of this movie’s best moves.

The kids will sure love A Very Jonas Christmas Movie, and while there were a few things for general audiences to like here, we ended up being more bored than made jolly. My viewing party got lost in their phones a few times, so I had to pull them out so we could witness this together. A Very Jonas Christmas Movie wasn’t the start to my holiday viewing season that I pictured, but at the end of the day, it was fun, so who cares? This movie’s getting the rare but impressive 2 star rating WITH a heart, because I’d rewatch it if the vibes were this good again. And I meant it when I said those songs were good—I listened to them the whole time I wrote this review!