A Dickensian Disaster of Epic Proportions
Forget comfort and joy; the new classic Dickens adaptation, Christmas Karma, is about as welcome as a dead Santa Claus in your fireplace. This cynically modern retelling of A Christmas Carol is a sluggish, unconvincingly acted, and utterly joyless affair, easily claiming the title of the worst Christmas film since last year’s abysmal The Merry Gentlemen.
Big Bang Theory star Kunal Nayyar delivers a performance as flat and lifeless as a deflated Christmas ornament as the Scrooge variant, Mr Sood. His portrayal of a man embittered by early poverty and the trauma of being expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in his childhood, whose heart was further hardened by a romance soured by his obsession with money, is delivered with all the emotional range of a Boney M song.
This grasping and unpleasant old guy in London, whose rather quaintly imagined moneylending business with his now-dead partner Jacob Marley (played by an equally bewildered Hugh Bonneville) is punctuated by stock footage of the London skyline, feels less like a character and more like a poorly assembled stereotype.
The film stumbles through petulant displays of boorish meanness towards his nephew, his long-suffering employees, and a genuinely baffling cheerful Cockney cabbie (Danny Dyer), before finally lurching into the supernatural.
Marley’s ghost makes an appearance, followed by the spirits of Christmas Past (Eva Longoria, looking as though she’d rather be anywhere else), Present (Billy Porter, oversaturated with tinsel), and Future (Boy George, who appears to have been literally summoned from the dead for the role, embodying an unsettling and unintentionally hilarious spectral presence).
The entire sequence borders on the preposterous and the frankly embarrassing.
Christmas Karma is not just a film; it’s a bewildering and oversaturated lecture. It clumsily attempts to weave in heavy-handed socio-political commentary and political critiques on Britain’s foreign policy regarding immigrants and refugees, while simultaneously throwing in a slight against America’s current immigration policies.
This incessant virtue signalling feels less like organic storytelling and more like a forced sermon, completely derailing any potential for genuine emotional connection.
Perhaps the most egregious and frankly insulting moment arrives when we are finally introduced to Bob Cratchit’s humble abode, complete with the discreetly disabled Tiny Tim. One braces for a depiction of brutal poverty, a cornerstone of Dickens’ original tale. Instead, we are treated to Cratchit’s house, seemingly nestled amidst the attractively multicoloured streets of an upper-middle-class suburb in London.
The sheer preposterousness of this visual is breathtaking. If Cratchit truly needed to raise cash, he could sell that prime piece of real estate and comfortably afford a chateau in the south of France, rendering his financial woes and Mr Sood’s miserliness utterly meaningless.
This glaring inconsistency not only undermines the film’s supposed social commentary but also strips the narrative of any real dramatic tension or pathos.
The musical numbers, if one can even call them that, resemble nothing more than a group of teenagers, emboldened by too much eggnog, awkwardly dancing to The Village People.
The entire spectacle makes A Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), with the magnificent Sir Michael Caine, look like a serious Oscar contender.
For a genuinely heartfelt and visually stunning adaptation of the beloved Dickens classic, audiences are far better off revisiting Robert Zemeckis’s visually stunning animated feature, A Christmas Carol (2009).
Altogether, Christmas Karma is a cynical, misguided, and utterly forgettable cinematic misfire that should be avoided at all costs, unless your idea of festive cheer involves a painful lesson in how not to adapt a timeless story.
Showing in South African cinemas from December 26, 2025.
-Dirk Lombard Fourie