Review of "Christmas Eve," DVD version

Review of

Christmas Eve, DVD version

Three out of five stars

 The premise of this movie is one that has appeared in several iterations, due to circumstances beyond their control, people are placed in close proximity for an extended period of time. In this case, several groups of people are trapped in several elevators due to a power outage. The largest group is a set of musicians in a freight elevator and the smallest is one person caught in a cage-like construction elevator on the side of a building. The outage is due to a van hitting a structure in the power grid and the event takes place on Christmas Eve.

 The person alone in the elevator is a real nasty man that makes unreasonable demands on everyone and wants to fire anyone that doesn’t conform to his views of proper behavior. (Satisfying his whims before he expresses them.) He is played by Patrick Stewart, a role quite different from others that viewers are more familiar with. The character is so nasty that the viewer has a little hope that he will simply fall out of the cage.

 In the other stalled elevators, the people find themselves interacting in ways that they ordinarily would not. Forced to pass the time in a small space with little else to do, they engage in some intense interaction. Some of it opens with hostility and uncertainty, while in other situations they start friendly and then grow antagonistic. Much of the changes in their behavior is predictable, there is some mellowing out of the more extreme behavioral outliers as they have time to reevaluate their actions.

 This is not an intense movie, several different “trapped in an elevator” situations are explored, with some changed behaviors and a lot of relief followed by simply getting on with their lives. There is change, but the viewer is generally left uncertain as to the extent.