Oh. What. Fun.
★★
I’ll admit it: when I saw Oh. What. Fun. pop up on Amazon Prime, my inner cheesy movie-critic brain immediately kicked in. You know the kind—the one ready to deploy a smug “Oh… what… fun” pun before the opening credits even roll. I tried to fight it. I really did. But unfortunately, this holiday movie earns that tone the hard way.
On paper, this should work. Directed by Michael Showalter (The State and The Big Sick) and featuring an absolutely stacked cast that includes Michelle Pfeiffer, Denis Leary, Felicity Jones, Chloë Grace Moretz, Dominic Sessak, Jason Schwartzman and Eva Longoria, this feels like it should at least be competent holiday comfort food.
Instead, it’s a baffling waste of talent.
The premise centers on Pfeiffer’s character, a mother who feels wildly underappreciated by her family and finally snaps during the holidays, ditching them to live out a long-suppressed Christmas fantasy of her own. Conceptually, that’s not a terrible idea. The film even frames itself as a corrective—arguing that Christmas pop culture has been dominated by male-centric stories and that moms deserve their own holiday reckoning.
Here’s the problem: we’re told Michelle Pfeiffer is an amazing, selfless mom…but we’re never shown that she is.
At no point does the movie do the basic storytelling work required to make us root for her. We don’t see her warmth, her sacrifices or the charm that would justify this emotional breaking point. So when she finally leaves her family behind, the movie expects empathy it hasn’t earned.
And then there’s the accent.
The film is set in Houston, and Pfeiffer is inexplicably rocking a thick Southern accent that no one else in the movie even attempts. It’s distracting, inconsistent and feels like a performance choice from an entirely different movie. Everyone else sounds like they wandered in from a coastal indie comedy and somehow no one thought to align those tones.
Comedy attempts pop up here and there, but everything lands flat. The movie keeps pushing toward chaotic family hijinks, hoping that noise and dysfunction will substitute for real humor or emotional grounding. It doesn’t. Instead, it just feels familiar in the worst way. We’ve seen this exact “messy family Christmas” story countless times and almost always done better.
That’s what makes this especially disappointing. Showalter is capable of sharp, empathetic storytelling. The Big Sick remains one of the best comedies of the last 25 years. But Oh. What. Fun. feels strangely careless, like a movie that grabs your attention with star power and then immediately stops trying.
By the end, I found myself struggling to stay awake—not because it was slow, but because nothing anyone did made sense. Characters make wild, illogical choices purely in service of the plot, and the movie shrugs as if that’s enough.
If this concept appeals to you—stacked cast, holiday setting, modern family tension—there are far better options. Happiest Season comes to mind: sharper writing, clearer character motivation and actual emotional payoff. You will not find those things here.
I love Christmas movies. I love watching Christmas movies. I wanted this to work.
But instead, all I could think was:
Oh.
What.
Fun.
(And not in a good way.)
