Approximately 179 years ago, a very dusty old English guy with spotty facial hair unwittingly unleashed the most insidious story in history onto the world. You know it, I know it, those scary football fish that live in the Marianas Trench know it: Charles Dickens’ under her belt. A second point for Foolish Karen.
What do you know? It looks like a tie! And because this is a completely fake competition that I made up, I’m deciding their fates.
Spirited takes an obsolete punchline and beats the shit out of it, expecting its viewers to giggle and guffaw simply because it had the audacity to do so. It’s as maddening as it is cheap and lazy. And that’s ironic, because A Christmas Karen seems like it was produced for $500 and two dozen couple dozen Krispy Kreme donuts to keep morale up. Yet, even on a shoestring budget, the script manages to include some genuine laughs before phoning it in for the last half hour.
I began this mission wondering which Karen could properly hit enough marks to be the less annoying version of an already outdated joke, but it turns out, there is no world where Christmas Karens won’t rub me the wrong way. There are no winners here; these characters are products of bad ideas that unintentionally diminish the inherent violence of real-life people that display these kinds of vile behaviors. There is no messaging nor thoughtful examinations from the white men who wrote these films on how to curb these continued acts of prejudice.
You’re free to tell me that I’m taking all of this too seriously, but there’s no reason we still need to bear witness to archaic Karen jokes on top of having to gulp down the umpteenth adaptations of A Christmas Carol. It’s blisteringly depressing that both of these films tried to spin original takes on Dickens’ tale, only to end up competing with one another in a smackdown because artists are so devoid of new ideas. When will Hollywood finally give up the ghost (of Christmas Past) when it comes to recycling memes two years too late? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’ll be rattling my chains come Christmas haunting whoever keeps greenlighting projects like these.
