SJust before the fleet of red Coca-Cola trucks races into town, it’s the arrival of Netflix’s festive programming made for pittance, a holiday tradition that’s just as bad for your teeth. It opened in 2023 with the deceptive title of “Best”. Christmas. Ever!, a lousy low point not just for the genre but for film as a whole last year, and so the perfectly competent “Meet Me Next Christmas” lands with a respectable shrug. It’s been worse in the streamer’s most crowded subgenre, and it will undoubtedly get worse, so it’s enough to look at it harmlessly.

Its moderate success is due in part to Chappelle’s Show director Rusty Cundieff and largely to leading actress Christina Milian, the one-time R&B star who has become a staple of the cheap romantic comedy, first on ABC Family with Snowglobe and Christmas Cupid before She graduated to Netflix with Falling Inn Love and the surprisingly entertaining Resort to Love. She’s been an entertainer in some capacity since she was 15, and her performance here is with the ease of sure hands that has us on our side early on. As with many of these films, the plot is built from stolen blocks, this time taken from the 2001 John Cusack/Kate Beckinsale romantic comedy Serendipity and Arnie’s 1996 children’s comedy Jingle All the Way. It works the magical interplay of the former and combines it with the stressful tussle of the latter, because the romantic future of Milian Layla could depend on whether or not she gets a ticket to a sold-out concert.

In the first scene, her trip to New York for Christmas is interrupted by a snowstorm, which lands her in the lounge next to a handsome stranger (Girls Trip’s Kofi Siriboe). As they flirt, she tells him about her celebratory ritual when she went to see the cheesy a cappella group Pentatonix with her handsome boyfriend. As they break up, he suggests that if they are both single next year, they should meet at the concert. A year later, exhausted by the betrayal, she is determined to find a ticket so she can see him again and enlists the help of a concierge company to do so. She is, as you might have guessed, paired with a handsome helper (former NFL player Devale Ellis) and they are sent on a manic quest across New York.

However, as you may have guessed, it’s not really New York, but rather a very recognizable Toronto, and while the general cheapness might be more distracting in another Netflix section (as in the seedy-looking teen slasher Time Cut last week), The chintz is part of the charm here. After all, these films are based on Hallmark’s micro-budget range (you can almost feel the fades to black during commercial breaks).

Thanks to Cundieff, the film feels light on its feet, and aside from an extremely unfunny comic interlude involving a rich couple with a ticket, the script by Molly Haldeman and Camilla Rubis is refreshingly not annoying. Milian is charmingly playful and has good chemistry with Ellis, even if their film often feels less like a romantic comedy and more like a strange Pentatonix tour commercial or a dangerous Pentatonix drinking game (always a shot of eggnog when someone says it). that Pentatonix will kill you before Christmas). ). It doesn’t seem to me like anyone in the real world cares that much about one of their concerts or has ever cared that much, but this movie doesn’t exist in the real world either and who would expect or want that? It exists in the Christmas movie world of Netflix, an ever-expanding place with ever-diminishing returns, and while this won’t be a film anyone would consider coming back to next Christmas, it’ll do for now.