Genie review – new Richard Curtis comedy can’t save Christmas for anyone | Film

Screenwriter Richard Curtis is a cinema colossus with nothing left to prove: he reinvented the romcom with transatlantic classics like Four Weddings, Notting Hill and The Tall Guy; he re-energised charitable giving with Comic Relief; and even those of us who never signed up to Love Actually concede the dark power of the Emma Thompson-crying scene. But we really do not need this new Christmas film from him (he writes, Sam Boyd directs), an unremittingly awful, bafflingly terrible and defanged bit of seasonal gibberish: a fantasy comedy which forgets to put in gags and which cheats its own narrative rules. Watching it is like trailing around a year-round Christmas market in March.