A Cinderella Story: Christmas Wish (2019)

Five installments into a franchise that began with Hilary Duff and a pumpkin-shaped cell phone, the Cinderella Story series has settled into a comfortable rhythm of digital releases and Vancouver soundstages. This one, subtitled Christmas Wish, concerns Kat, a seventeen-year-old singer-songwriter who works as a singing elf at a billionaire's Santa Land while her stepfamily skims her wages. Laura Marano performs the role with the standard-issue pluck. The film arrives on streaming platforms in mid-October, well before the holiday it depicts, which tells you most of what you need to know about the commercial calculus behind it.

The supporting cast includes Isabella Gómez as the loyal best friend and Garfield Wilson as the stern boss, both of whom occupy their roles without the screenplay ever pausing to comment on their presence. That is not a criticism. It is simply an observation that the film's inclusivity is ambient, the byproduct of ordinary casting, not an argument. The narrative itself is a straight line back to Perrault. Kat wants to be a songwriter, her friend Isla believes in her, and yet the rescue still arrives by way of a man with a checkbook. A benevolent billionaire and his smitten son solve the heroine's financial problems in the final act, and the stepmother's greed is presented as a personal failing rather than a symptom of anything larger. There is no critique of wealth here. There is instead a charity gala.

The film's only stated lesson is that we should follow our dreams, delivered without a raised voice or a raised eyebrow. Nobody lectures. Nobody takes a stand. The musical numbers are pleasant, the romance is chaste, and the whole enterprise evaporates from memory roughly forty minutes after the credits. For those of us who catalogue such things, this is a barren specimen. A Christmas wish, it turns out, is just a wish.