Directed by Debbie Isitt

Oh dear. For a while I couldn't help warming to this daft seasonal film. Just like a supermarket Christmas pud, sometimes the old oversweet goody is just what you feel like, and not the fancy cloth-wrapped one full of macadamia nuts and crystallised fruits. But then, but then...as Isitt pulls out all the stops and more in this inescapably gooey combination of kids and Christmas and romance (there's even a dog), you notice it's really like that chemically assisted squirty cream and doesn't taste like real schmaltz at all. And despite its ironic, Britcom mode, you come out feeling stuffed and slightly sick and hankering after one of those really scruffy nativity plays in a hall that still smells of school dinners, with teatowels round their heads, where half of them don't want to be in it and the angel's wings fall off.

Martin Freeman is, well, the usual Martin Freeman persona, as ‘Mr Madden', previously wannabee actor and now primary school teacher. When it's time for the annual battle of the Nativity plays, always won by the snooty private school up the road, where his former colleague, smarmy toff Gordon Shakespeare (Jason Watkins) now teaches, Madden in a moment of madness fantasises to him that his ex-girlfriend Jennifer (Ashley Jensen), now allegedly a Hollywood producer, is coming to film their production. The word unfortunately gets out, and much hilarity ensues, involving a desperate trip to Hollywood to try and persuade the studio to make it true.

Much is being made of this being a British film, but it seems as much so by its faults and weaknesses as by its merits. Ricky Tomlinson is shoehorned in as the unlikely scouse mayor of Coventry, poor Pam Ferris does another line in middle-aged lady eccentrics as the headmistress, and Coventry makes its bid for fame as the setting, with the sombre and mystical cathedral ruins all tackied up for the play that eventually emerges.

Not for a moment do we think this smart, good-looking class of cute kids is anything but bursting with talent, nor doubt that zany care-in-the-community type class assistant Mr Poppy (Mark Wootton) will turn out to be brimful of ideas. And so it proves. How much more engaging it would have been if they'd really been a class of mouthy no-hopers in a proper sink school. And if the children had been given a proper role in the plot, rather than merely being the ground troops of the assault on our sentimental susceptibilities. Oh yes, there's the neglected kid longing to impress his mother, and the almost unbearably precocious one, and the girl with the funny teeth, but that's easy stuff. The grand finale goes on far too long, with a belief in its own lovableness which certainly grated on me. Preying on the parental soft spot for nativity plays - and I have not been immune in my time - was always going to be a winner, but sadly, though it has its very nice moments, it also has a rather knowing edge, as moppets caper and grasp their crotches and belt out saucy songs at us. And so this is Christmas? I fear, these days, it may be.

Seen at Cinema Days, Empire Cinema, Rubery, Birmingham, 2 October 2009