Christmas with the Kranks on Hulu might just explain the death of cultural criticism

Something happens to me every December where movies and music that are objectively bad suddenly become irresistible simply because they are “about Christmas.” By this I mean I spend whole days listening to Michael Bublé and the one Zooey Deschanel album and whole nights watching what Netflix has produced the latest – namely movies where hot people kiss in towns called “Snow Falls”.

That’s how I recently found myself pressing play on the 2004 comedy christmas with the krenkens, streaming on Hulu and starring Tim Allen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dan Aykroyd and the kid from Malcolm in the middle. Of course I had already seen it, and of course the only thing that stuck out to me was, “How could a college age woman love ham so much?” (a central plot point, somehow). At least it was fine. It managed to do its job of turning my brain into a snow globe for an hour and 34 minutes.

This was before my fiance, an unrepentant Letterboxd snob, decided to look up reviews for Christmas with the Sick and found that it has a 5 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Five! This means that out of 100 reviews, only five of them were good. Incredibly low, I thought, for a film I would at least consider watchable. And the reviews themselves were bad: Robert Ebert called it “a holiday movie with mind-boggling awfulness that gets worse when it gets tacky at the end,” while the Washington Post said it was “a leaden whimsy so heavy it threatening to crash through the multiplex floor.”

My first thought wasn’t anger at the critics 20 years ago for tearing apart a movie I’d just spent 94 precious minutes watching. It was the overwhelming suspicion that if Christmas with the Sick were to come out today, it would receive a significantly better critical reception than it did 20 years ago.

So I looked up reviews for similar mid-budget Christmas movies from the 2000s that remain popular on streaming (Crank is the seventh most popular movie on Hulu right now). Turns out critics hated a lot of them too. The 2008s four christmases, starring Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn, has a paltry 25 percent rating and stayed called a “miscast mess” by Empire magazine and “creepy” by The Guardian.

Ron Howard’s The Grinch Who Stole Christmas of 49 percent, was post-synchronized “a sleazy, creepy, weird movie.” Most shocking of all, the holiday, an objectively perfect Nancy Meyers film despite Kate Winslet ending up with Jack Black was called “soggy, syrupy” and “bloating” by BBC and was criticized for not “saying much”.

Remember the last time you read a review of a Christmas rom-com that complained that it didn’t have enough to say? I don’t do that. That’s because no one expects them to say anything anymore. And that’s bad for the current state of pop culture.

Consider the kind of reviews the legions of made-for-streaming Christmas movies are getting these days. Comedies that manage to capture actual A-listers and decent-sized budgets like Spirited and The Christmas Chronicle receiving mostly positive reviews for being “fun for the whole family”, while mid-range romances suffer A Christmas prince who falls for Christmas, and Hot Frosty is praised for being simply acceptable. An LA Weekly critic called the astonishingly awful Lindsay Lohan Netflix joint Falling for Christmas “perfect background noise for gift wrapping or a great reason for a cackling friend watch and group activity (while getting happy and juicy).”

It’s worth asking what the point of reviewing a movie is if the conclusion is “Sure, it’s bad, but skip it if you don’t plan on paying attention.” This isn’t a dig at the critic in question (who, to be fair, only included it as part of a roundup of 2022’s Christmas movies). Rather, it is an indictment of the way we are now expected to engage with film – and also TV and music. It’s now taken for granted that when we click “play” on a streaming platform, it’s probably not the only thing we pay attention to.

The The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka argued the homogenous, predictable vibes-based “ambient TV” (think Emily in Paris, Dream Home Makeoverand basically any show about food) that keeps users watching even when they’re not is the backbone of the streaming economy. “Like previous eras of television, ambient television is less a creative innovation than a product of the technological and social forces of our time,” he writes.

The effect has been to degrade the quality we now expect from our movies, TV and music. Still, that’s only part of the equation. As streaming platforms proliferated, so did social media, which dramatically increased the amount of content people consume that is produced by amateur posters as opposed to creative professionals. Meanwhile, algorithmic social media platforms force the most mediocre content onto their users. Now we also struggle with the problem of an endless font of AI slop, synthesizing everything that came before it and churning out versions that are worse.

However, bad films being praised as “good enough” is not just a film industry or algorithmic problem. In the late 2000s, social media ushered in an era of poptimism: if critics openly trashed a movie or artist that was popular, they were seen as a snob or out of touch with the millions of people who suddenly had just as much power to publish their own opinions. “Now when a pop star reaches a certain level of fame,” Chris Richards wrote in Washington Post in 2015“something magical happens. They no longer seem to get bad reviews. Stars become superstars, critics become cheerleaders, and the discussion froths into a consensus of uncritical enthusiasm.”

Poptimism is not only bad. One of its effects was that critics suddenly had to take seriously the underrepresented opinions of non-white people, young people and women. But there is also something inherently cowardly about trying to match the tastes of the masses, afraid of being left behind.

Perhaps because social media democratized the role of the cultural critic, or perhaps because of the wider collapse of local journalism (and journalism writes big), but today we have fewer professional critics writing film reviews. Which means critics aren’t busy reviewing Roger Ebert-Crank state as they used to – with one exception. Action-comedy Christmas movie of the year The red, starring The Rock and Chris Evans, was dubbed “a distinctly joyless execution of a premise” by critics, who mostly seemed annoyed by the gargantuan budget ($250 million) and the Marvel-wannabe plot.

The reviews are almost refreshingly nostalgic – perhaps a sign that not all corners of media have evolved into the current state of things: a culture industry where producers and audiences alike would rather obsess over charts, follower numbers and profitability than engage with topic.

I realize now that I am part of the problem. I treated Christmas with the Sick as a moviegoer in 2024: something to throw on while looking at my phone, then look up its Rotten Tomatoes score as if its algorithm could synthesize all the infinite nuances of what a good review entails. I have no interest in litigating Crank is a good movie or not, but reading its terrible reviews reminded me that even the most mediocre Christmas comedy should be taken seriously. We should demand more than just okay movies where recognizable stars follow predictably comforting tropes—even when all you’re looking for is a brain that snowballs.