After Broadway dancer Ashley is aged out of her job in New York, she decides to head home for Christmas to recoup. There, she learns that her parents’ venue, The Rhythm Room, is on the brink of foreclosure due to $30,000 in back payments. Ashley decides to stage an all-male revue to win back some customers and pay off her parents’ debt.
Hot off the heels of Hot Frosty comes The Merry Gentlemen, another holiday rom-com offering from Netflix. And while Hot Frosty was a pleasant surprise, The Merry Gentlemen was sadly a disappointment. The premise is a reliable one, if not exactly original. The business is struggling and needs a miracle to stay afloat. Put on a show, charge a lot of money, and save the day! That’s The Merry Gentlemen in a nutshell, except the show is an all-male revue where hunky guys bump and grind while stripping off their clothes – well, a shirt, anyway.
Britt Robertson is as adorable as Ashley, but the character is sorely underdeveloped. All we really know is that she loves to dance, and being a Jingle Belle was all she had ever wanted to do with her life.
Chad Michael Murray’s Luke isn’t much better. He’s a handyman and divorcee whose ex-wife left him to go live in a big city. I suppose that’s to create some emotional stakes in the relationship, as Ashley lives in a big city, and will history repeat itself? Take a guess. Murray’s performance is low-energy, and he comes across as completely uninterested in what he’s doing. Together, Ashley and Luke make for a rather bland couple, lacking the heat needed to keep the romance interesting.
The Merry Gentlemen runs 87 minutes and definitely feels rushed. There is little time for any character development or for the romance to blossom. More time is spent on the revue performances, and honestly, if you’ve watched these guys dance and strip off their shirts once, you really don’t need to see much more of it – yes, I am sure there may be some people out there who disagree with me there! But time was wasted on the awkward stripping, where those minutes could have been used to give the movie some more tangible plot.
In any case, I wasn’t a big fan. I didn’t feel as though much had happened, and I didn’t buy into the insta-romance between Ashley and Luke. When the chemistry is good, I can believe a character would give up their dreams to stay with their supposed soulmate. But when there’s little sizzle, the decisions of our leads make no sense to me. The Merry Gentlemen just came across as uninspired, with stale dialogue and little charm. If you want to be mildly titillated, by all means, give the movie a watch. But there are plenty of quality holiday rom-coms to watch this year instead.
Watched: 12/17/2024
Notable Song: The Magic of the Season by David Isaac Feldstein
