Christmas Karma narrowly misses being a highway pile up, mainly because its heart is in the right place, believes Deepa Gahlot.
The idea sounds good: The Charles Dickens classic 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, about the true spirit of Christmas, getting a Bollywood makeover by a British film-maker with Indian roots, Gurinder Chadha.
Right from her early films like Bhaji On The Beach and Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder has been the voice of the Indian community in the UK.
Some of her culture-mix films, like Bride and Prejudice, and It's A Wonderful Afterlife have not quite managed to pull it off.
Her latest, Christmas Karma, is a little too ambitious.
Hindi cinema has moved on, or tried to, from the loud, garish song-dance-melodrama that the Western viewer still associates with Bollywood, and it is that audience Gurinder is targeting.
But to outdo Bollywood requires a certain amount of chutzpah, as well as the restraint to prevent it from going over the top.
This is what has happened with Christmas Karma -- it just doesn't know when to stop or dial down the racket.
With her own experiences in mind, Gurinder has given her Indian Scrooge -- or Sood -- a back story to explain his meanness.
His family came to the UK as refugees, when the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin threw out the Indian community. His life was upended and he went through poverty and heartbreak. This part is moving and authentic.
Middle-aged wealthy bachelor Eshaan Sood (Kunal Nayyar) is obnoxious and stingy and inflicts misery on everyone, most of all the employees of his financial investment company called Marley & Sood, which he inherited after his mentor Jacob Marley (Hugh Bonneville) died.
He is the kind of nasty boss, who fires staff at will and won't give his housekeeper Mrs Joshi (Shobu Kapoor) leave or a Christmas bonus because she's Hindu.
Still, he has the loyal accountant Bob Crachit (Leo Suter), who struggles to financially support his wife Mary (Pixie Lott) and their four children, including the disabled son Tiny Tim (Freddie Marshall-Ellis), in need of medical treatment.
The crotchety Sood does not get along with his nephew and his family, and squabbles with almost everyone he encounters.
Just like in A Christmas Carol, Sood has a nightmare where he sees the ghost of Marley, who tells him that three more ghosts will be visiting: The Ghost of Christmas Past (Eva Longoria in Mexican Day of the Dead get up), the Ghost of Christmas Present (a campy Billy Porter), and the Ghost of Christmas Future (Boy George), each of whom shows Sood his life during these respective time periods.
Marley tells Sood to change his life before it's too late.
Of course, Sood undergoes a transformation, which was the theme of Dickens' Victorian morality tale.
The message of hope and healing remains relevant, no matter what the period may be.
Despite the high-powered cast that Gurinder assembled, the performances are not appealing.
Of the lot, Billy Porter looks at home in this mish-mash musical and is the best singer of them all, though the film's songs (by Gary Barlow, Nitin Sawhney, Shaznay Lewis, Gurinder and Ben Cullum) are not particularly memorable.
There are a few enjoyable bits, but not enough to lift the film from its mismatched cultural influences and uneven tone.
Veering from the simplicity of the story, Gurinder also tries to tackle racism, hate crime, the problems of immigrants and other serious issues -- important, especially in today's polarised times, but perhaps best left to another film.
An attempted multicultural update of the Dickens story to fit the UK's vibrant, varied racial profile, Christmas Karma narrowly misses being a highway pile up, mainly because its heart is in the right place.
