Oh. What. Fun.

• Directed by Michael Showalter
• December 3, 2025
• Prime Video
• Based on the short story Oh. What. Fun. by Chandler Baker

A mom that makes the Christmas magic happen every year for her family hits the breaking point and goes missing.

I went into Oh. What. Fun. with low expectations. Very low. Hollywood in general lacks the ability to make a good Christmas film or a genuinely funny comedy. Merging the two effectively feels like it would take the hand of God these days.

Perhaps the first red flag should’ve been the two relatively known commodities of Michelle Pfeiffer and Denis Leary headlining a movie that was dumped on streaming. Pfeiffer is the biggest name here and a big name in general so premiering on Prime Video feels like a step down.

I can admit that streaming is probably the future of film releases. Not happy about it because I like the theater experience. At this point though with the theater experience still available, when a film with some celebrities arrives on a platform it’s usually an indication that the studio did not have strong faith in it. After viewing this, I can certainly see why.

Largely the characters are not likable. They’re either ridiculously pathetic or just insufferable. There is the loser son Sammy (Dominic Sessa) who has no clue how unacceptable it is for somebody not living at home to work only three months a year at a summer camp. There is Taylor (Chloë Grace Moretz) who has a different girlfriend every time the family gets together and is professing love each time. Who can forget Channing (Felicity Jones) that acts like she can barely stand her milquetoast husband Doug (Jason Schwartzman).

What would you expect with mother like Claire (Pfeiffer) who has been texting regularly to her kids to enter her in the Holiday Mom contest on The Zazzy Tims Show? Is she working to make the holidays special because she loves her family or simply for the recognition? One is selfless while the other is narcissistic. The answer comes before the credits.

The glue that holds the family together is the mother and it’s kind of phony when you get dig down into it. Channing decides when mom is in the throws of Christmas that she should tell mommy she would rather go skiing with her own family than come home during the holidays and see mom and dad. How did Channing think such an announcement would go over during the time of year her mother invested the most in?

Like too many movies (it seems) the dialogue in movies with families, we hear how terrible and thoughtless the family at the center of Oh. What. Fun. is. They all have a bit of an axe to grind and none of it is funny. This isn’t even a movie about a holiday gone horribly wrong. This is a movie about people bitter because they’re not getting the worship and praise for their responsibilities they voluntarily take on. Or their bad attempts at bonding fail. Or SOMETHING!

Things fall apart when Clare is forgotten by the family when they all go to show based on a popular reality show she bought tickets for. Not only do they leave the house without her, but they arrive at the show that mom has been pushing for and take their seats before catching the mistake. How? The answer comes before the credits.

Like a psychopath, Claire travels to the show the day of the taping with the contest winners and sneaks into the group presentation in a way that is not funny but communicates a need for therapy. After hitting it big with War of the Worlds, Eva Longoria is daytime host Zazzy Tims and just as resentful towards her family as Claire is with hers. The line involving pancakes hints that one of Zazzy’s kids might feel the same as she does. If you must buy your own gifts like Zazzy you either need group therapy or to start cutting people off. Then there is the post show scene where Zazzy, her staff, and Claire are passing a joint while trashing their children and spouses. HOW FESTIVE!

Denis Leary and Michelle Pfeiffer are supposed to be parents with relatively young children, but they don’t look like they should. Leary is sporting dyed hair which does not work with his complexion. That’s either because of age related issues or too much make up. He still delivers his lines well, being funny or dramatic as necessary but it just doesn’t look right.

Leary’s character Nick runs a construction company of poorly defined type. It is important enough for a moment where his character Nick being unable to assemble a dollhouse for his grandkids calls in two employees to put it together. FUNNY! Then when the reveal comes of the finished product we see it is terrible. HILARIOUS! Did he not check first? What does this say about how he runs his company?

Pfeiffer has the same appearance issues as Leary. Too much make up or something going on with her due to age. The more I think about it the more I become convinced that they cast the two for name recognition over character appropriateness and tried their best to make them look youthful.

The ending bothers me. Or maybe it doesn’t when I think about it. Everybody comes to an understanding with Claire not having to do anything for Christmas anymore. She just gets to sit in a hot tub while Channing gets the ski vacation tradition that she wants and everybody must do what she wants. The whole cast is shown having Christmas without Claire as she gets wine drunk. So the message is that Christmas wasn’t about making it special for her family but for getting adulation for making it special for her family. When that quest finally went belly-up it was “Screw them!” An overall horrible message.

How is this good? Mom has just made herself unnecessary to the family. The closing scene of the family having a good time without her does not strike me as positive. They even look happier with her gone. Present are smiles and laughs straight out of a classic bit of Christmas flashback. They make cookies with it all going smoothly.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is probably a definitive example of how to do a Christmas comedy right. There a father is desperate to give his family a special Christmas like he always wanted or had, but everything he tries just doesn’t work out. It’s a comedically escalating pile of problems that result in the climax with no offramp for it once he starts down the road. Generally his heart is in the right place but there is always a fumble. Here nobody’s heart is in the right place.

Normally the competing neighbor would be a source of major interference, but Jeanne Wang-Wasserman (Joan Chen slumming it) gives a reason for a connection to give the man child and his new girlfriend-a woman vastly more accomplished than he looks like he could ever hope to be. Not saying he must go to graduate school or anything but maybe see that having a camp counselor job three months out of the year is not the best life choice. One line from him to say that would’ve been good. That is the closest to character growth we get: a man that finds a woman willing to shoot low.

Oh. What. Fun. intentionally or not has a terrible message. But the far bigger wrong is that it just isn’t funny. It’s stacked with unlikable characters and two leads that look far too old to play their parts. It’s not a complete loss but you’ll forget this one by next season until Prime Video reminds you it’s there and then you just won’t watch.