Summary
Meet Me Next Christmas is a strange Pentatonix advert that’s entirely forgettable as a rom-com, but it’s always nice to see Christina Milian in things.
There are a lot of valid complaints that one can throw at Netflix, and the fact that the world’s biggest streaming service turns into a conveyor belt for Hallmark-style Christmas movies every year is chief among them. There’s a comfort in the familiar and the predictable, I suppose, which is the space where Meet Me Next Christmas lives, like Falling for Christmas, Holidate, and so on, and so forth.
Who watches these? Apart from me, obviously, but I have a professional obligation that gets me off the hook. Whoever it is, I’d be interested to know what they thought of this one, which somehow has a very original premise while also being totally and utterly predictable. That has to count for something, even if it’s not very much.
And Christina Milian’s in this! At no point does she drop it low or pick it up slow, which is a shame, but it’s nice to see her working. And she’s very suited to this kind of unchallenging fare that mostly just needs a very good-looking actress to roam around and gradually fall for an equally good-looking but lesser-known co-star — in this case, Devale Ellis, mostly known from Tyler Perry’s Sistas (don’t get me started on Tyler Perry, we’ll be here all night.)
But Meet Me Next Christmas is a really weird movie. It’s mostly a feature-length advertisement for the Grammy-winning a cappella group Pentatonix if anyone remembers those guys. I have no idea why this is the case. The band doesn’t just get a namecheck, but one of their concerts is a major plot point and they’re all in the movie, playing puppet masters for the wild goose chase rom-com that’s happening across New York.
Devale Ellis in Meet Me Next Christmas | Image via Netflix
Here’s the idea. Layla (Milian) finds herself stuck in a swanky airport lounge during a business trip, leaving her separated from her boyfriend over Christmas and left to the suave charms of James (Kofi Siriboe), a similarly stranded businessman. Layla loves Pentatonix, and she and her boyfriend, Tanner (Brendan Morgan), go to their concert every year. James tries his luck – he and Layla will meet at the concert next year if they both happen to be single and fate conspires to unite them.
A year later, Layla catches Tanner in bed with another woman and resolves to meet “Airport James”, but because she’s having difficulty procuring a ticket to the sold-out show last minute, she hires a concierge from an agency to help her. The concierge, Teddy (Ellis), also happened to be in the airport lounge twelve months prior and advised Layla to put sriracha on her quiche (cooking’s kind of his thing), so you won’t be surprised to learn that their misadventures trying to acquire a ticket only bring Layla and Teddy closer together.
I didn’t hate this movie, somewhat surprisingly, but I couldn’t help casting a cynical eye in its direction whenever Pentatonix were mentioned or, worse, crowbarred in. There’s just a whiff of contractual obligation surrounding that sort of thing that gives me pause. Does anyone even remember Pentatonix?
But the scenes between Layla and Teddy aren’t terrible. There’s chemistry between the leads and some of the jokes are okay, especially once Kalen Allen arrives to lead us off on a silly but pretty fun subplot in which the leads compete in a lip-synch battle for the tickets.
There are zero surprises here, though, and while that might be what people want, it doesn’t give the weird story of Meet Me Next Christmas a great deal of staying power or, regrettably, much reason to recommend it. As the warning shot in 2024’s Christmas offerings – if you don’t count A Very Flattened Christmas, anyway, which is aiming at a rather different target demographic – it does the job of settling us in for a season of mediocre festive entertainment. That’s something to look forward to, I guess.
