After wasting our time with Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 last night, Morgan lamented that we should’ve spent our time in the days before Christmas watching a Christmas movie. Luckily for Morgan, we spent our time more wisely tonight with Oh. What. Fun., and honestly, yeah, it was kinda fun.

While the beats for the most part were nothing new, what made this movie enjoyable was its cast. Not only was the cast full of stars, they had a lot of entertaining chemistry, especially between the siblings (Felicity Jones, Dominic Sessa, and Chloë Grace Moretz) and Jason Schwartzman, whose character deserved way more love from his family. It’s ok to be boring! At least he was nice! I have nothing bad to say about Pfeiffer, Leary, or Chen; they were good, but nothing too noteworthy.

In this genre, I usually prefer when the family dysfunction results in messy and destructive hijinks rather than just a lot of angry people and shouting matches, and while this movie leaned towards the latter, it was still a fun time. The emphasis on moms as the motor for the holidays was an important one, and definitely not an idea propagated all that much by other Christmas movies (as this one points out right at the beginning). The scene on The Zazzy Tims Show was also a good time, and a refreshingly new beat.

Oh. What. Fun. didn’t reinvent the wheel, but it did what some new Christmas movies fail to do: put together some actors who actually seem to enjoy each other’s company and the movie that they’re making. There were a number of funny bits (“Blessings!”) and smaller performances that I liked (like Havana Rose Liu and Zac Oyama; what was he doing there?!?), with a solid score and some great needle drops. Oh. What. Fun. may not be one I revisit next year, but it certainly wasn’t a holiday swing and miss. I’ve had plenty of those, so a base hit here was welcome.