Netflix’s latest holiday romcom starring Minka Kelly is being slated by critics, who have deemed it “charmless” and “forgettable.”
Champagne Problems, streaming now, stars Kelly, 45, as an American executive sent to Paris to try and close a deal with a renowned champagne brand before Christmas. However, her plans are upended when she falls into a whirlwind romance with a Parisian man (Tom Wozniczka), whom she later discovers is the founder’s son.
In a paltry two-star review of the movie, The Guardian’s Adrian Horton felt that it “lacks fizz,” adding that the “mostly charmless romance” is part of the streamer’s continual “annual onslaught of forgettable festive films.”
“[It] was so disposable I forgot I had even reviewed it, it goes down like cheap bubbly, appropriately flat and situational,” Horton wrote.
Of Kelly’s performance, she found it to be “more maternal presence than a romantic lead,” while Wozniczka, she argued, “provides exactly the dollop of French charm with mild self-torture and nothing more.” “The gimmicks are unfunny, the romance inoffensive, the happy-ever-after straightforward,” Horton said.
The Wall Street Journal’s John Anderson felt similarly, insisting that the film is “as sticky as a half-finished candy cane.”
“Champagne Problems walks a fine line between a Hallmark-movie aesthetic and a tongue-and-cheek treatment of its own alleged genre,” Anderson said. “All the coincidences and conflicts are conjured up, per the necessities of a quick-cooking holiday love affair.”
While he felt Kelly “is the freshest thing about Champagne Problems,” he criticized her chemistry with Wozniczka, saying, they “don’t generate a great deal of natural heat.”
Andrew Morgan of the news site What’s on Netflix mostly agreed that Kelly and Wozniczka “are not a classic romantic pair in a sense as they don’t ooze sensuality.”
“But what they do have is a warmth & believable emotional connection that makes the audience lean in,” he noted.
A recurring theme among critics is that the film lacks originality. “The conflict is a tale as old as time and has no depth that differentiates it from others,” wrote Archi Sengupta for Leisure Byte.
“The film is repetitive and a bit boring, because you already know what’s going to happen. Moreover, I didn’t believe the romance at all as it felt very scripted and overdone,” she added. “It takes away from the magic of falling in love during the most romantic time of the year, which is such a bummer of epic proportions.”
Singling out the movie’s ending, Blu-ray.com’s Brian Orndorf opined that it dragged to a close “with the same old moves seen in hundreds, if not thousands of these pictures.”
“[Director Mark Steven Johnson] goes for plasticized fantasy instead of trusting the moderate intimacy and light humor that’s worked for the first two acts of the movie,” he said, giving it a rating of six out of ten stars.
Despite the abysmally low reviews, viewers appear eager to watch the holiday romcom. “Oh I am seated for this one. Topping the hearts for sure,” one wrote on X, with a second admitting, “I’m such a sucker for christmas romcoms.”
Another commented that they were currently watching it, “and enjoying it.”
Champagne Problems is available to stream on Netflix.
