Ocean’s 2½.
One of the minor benefits of the modern streaming landscape is that it occasionally realises that not every Christmas film needs to involve a small-town baker saving a prince from a misunderstanding. Sometimes, all we really want is for two attractive people to rob a department store while snow falls on the Thames. Jingle Bell Heist, the latest offering from Netflix’s festive conveyor belt, understands this modest ambition perfectly, positioning itself as a festive younger sibling to the Ocean’s franchise, swapping the Bellagio for a high-end London emporium and the Rat Pack for a pair of desperate wage slaves.
The movie introduces us to Sophia Martin (Olivia Holt), a young woman who’s juggling two jobs and some petty theft to fund her mother’s private cancer treatment – a plot contrivance that hints at Jingle Bell Heist being retrofitted to a UK setting at some point during production – but when her latest haul is filmed by Nick O’Connor (Connor Swindells), a disgraced security consultant, recently released from prison she finds herself blackmailed into attempting a bigger heist. When the pair find out someone has beat them to it, though, they set their sights on crooked department store owner Maxwell Sterling (Peter Serafinowicz) and his office safe which is reputed to contain half a million pounds in cash.
Swindells, arguably the strongest asset here, plays Nick not as a smooth operator but as a man entirely exhausted by his own life. He brings a weary, scruffy authenticity to the role that contrasts sharply with the high-gloss production design. When he and Holt team up to rob the impregnable vault of Sterling’s Emporium on Christmas Eve, their dynamic feels less like a smouldering romance and more like a chaotic partnership born of necessity, which is far more watchable. Serafinowicz plays Maxwell Sterling, the target of the pair’s larceny with a level of pantomime villainy that suggests he’s dreaming of Die Hard and understands that in a film this light, the antagonist must be utterly devoid of redeeming features to justify the crime. He essentially functions as a human humbug, providing a guilt-free target for the audience’s moral compass and his theatrically chilly relationship with his wife, played by Lucy Punch, is almost worth the subscription fee alone.
Director Michael Fimognari does well to avoid the flat, television-movie visual language that often plagues straight to streaming movies and Jingle Bell Heist utilises its London locations to good effect. The department store – a thinly veiled stand-in for Harrods or Liberty – feels like a tangible space with distinct zones and perils, rather than a series of disconnected soundstages. The action sequences are coherent, prioritising clarity over chaos, allowing us to follow the “how” of the theft without needing a diagram.
Musically, the choice to eschew the standard orchestral swells for a soundtrack of alternative festive tracks – shout out to the inclusion of Run-DMC – gives the slightly twee proceedings a cooler, sharper edge, creating a vibe that’s less “hallmark card” and more “late-night shopping rush,” and while Jingle Bell Heist is unreservedly a manufactured product it’s at least one assembled with a degree of care and competence that is refreshing; a perfectly adequate, lightweight confection: shiny, easily digested, but forgotten by Boxing Day.
