BRIAN VINER: Is Christmas Karma the worst festive movie of all time?

Christmas Mashup (PG, 118 minutes)

Decision: Cinemas will empty faster than a dysentery epidemic

Evaluation:

ONE STAR

If you pass by Westminster Abbey anytime soon, beware of the humming sound. There will be no construction crews working in Parliament Square. It will have Charles Dickens turning in his grave having just seen Christmas Karma.

The Bollywood-inspired musical adaptation of Dickens’s 1843 story A Christmas Carol is set in modern-day London and features Danny Dyer as a singing taxi driver; Not to mention Hugh Bonneville as Jacob Marley and Boy George as the Ghost of Christmas Future.

One of the film’s impressive achievements is that it evacuated theaters faster than a dysentery epidemic.

After screening it with fellow critics in London last week, I couldn’t believe how terrible it was; On Tuesday afternoon I went to the Odeon in Hereford to endure it once more.

Not since another of Dickens’s works, Oliver Twist, has anyone displayed such staggering anxiety for seconds at a time.

For the first time, I didn’t know what to expect. I was even hoping that the film, written and directed by Gurinder Chadha, who made the charming Bend It Like Beckham in 2002, might be quite entertaining.

The Bollywood-inspired musical adaptation of Dickens’s 1843 story A Christmas Carol is set in modern-day London and stars Hugh Bonneville as Jacob Marley (pictured)

The second time, on the contrary, I felt like a man about to undergo root canal surgery without anesthesia. Even a package of Entertainment, enough to get me through most cinematic tests, didn’t give me relief.

Yet with Ebenezer Scrooge-like misanthropy, I did not warn the few others in the audience, just sat back in my £18.95 first-class seat and waited for them to come to their own conclusions, which they duly did.

At the beginning I counted seven people in the auditorium, but at the blessed end I counted only three, including me.

Christmas Karma’s version of Scrooge is first-generation Indian immigrant Eshaan Sood, a scowling, malevolent, self-taught founder of a financial services firm called Marley & Sood who treats his employees and everyone else like dirt.

He is played by Kunal Nayyar, known for his role as Raj in the US comedy series The Big Bang Theory.

There was certainly a bang when The Christmas Mashup went into general release last Friday and critics opened fire. Among the extraordinarily terrible reviews was a brief review of mine. Blessing it with one star out of five, I wrote that it deserves to be haunted for the rest of time by the ghost of good movies past.

For the Telegraph man he deserved no stars. He claimed it was ‘among the worst things to happen at Christmas since King Herod’. He added that when he evaluated it honestly, it felt like ‘kicking Tiny Tim off the fire escape’. According to the Guardian, Chadha’s film was ‘lead, unconvincingly acted and welcome as a dead mouse in eggnog’.

Of course, no one sets out to make a terrible movie. Giving A Christmas Carol an Anglo-Indian makeover with carols must have once seemed like a grand idea not only to Chadha but also to those who financed his project.

The Ghost of Christmas Future is played by a clearly unsettled Boy George (left); George looks slightly confused, as if he’d been told the party was a smart outfit, as if it wasn’t.

One of the film’s impressive achievements is that it evacuated theaters faster than a dysentery epidemic.

Meanwhile, the producers include Trudie Styler, who makes a cameo appearance as a woman who collects for charity and is duly sent packing by the evil Mr. Sood.

When it comes to packaging, Christmas Mix allowed Chadha to explore her own background, having grown up in Kenya before moving to the UK. Mr Sood is one of more than 28,000 Ugandan Asians who came to the UK after being deported by President Idi Amin in 1972.

She is forced to think about her happy childhood in Africa and the traumatic sudden transport to a cold land that smells of stewed cabbage by the Ghost of Christmas Past, inexplicably played by Eva Longoria of Desperate Housewives fame as a Mexican spirit in Day of the Dead.

Perhaps there are seeds of something profound in the flashbacks to Uganda and the Sood family’s arrival at Heathrow, where they were greeted by banner-waving anti-immigration demonstrators.

But there are so many misjudgments in Christmas Karma that its flirtations with racism, assimilation, and other things that might be thought to reinforce the narrative feel like an accident, as if the delicious-looking chipolata had somehow fallen into a bowl of overcooked sprouts.

Moreover, no matter how hard the script tries to make sense of the fact that the character Scrooge is a Hindu who does not drink alcohol, eat meat, or celebrate Christmas, it fails.

After a screening with fellow critics in London last week, I couldn’t believe how terrible it was; On Tuesday afternoon I went to the Odeon in Hereford to endure it once more.

For the first time, I didn’t know what to expect. I was even hoping that the film, written and directed by Gurinder Chadha (pictured), who made 2002’s charming Bend It Like Beckham, might be entertaining.

The film was only a minute or two ago when Danny Dyer, behind the wheel of his black cab on Christmas Eve, sang the title song, unbecoming of Cole Porter or even a Billingsgate doorman: ‘The taxi wheels turn again/Common ground is lost and found again/Shows what goes round and round again.’ TRUE.

Our hope that things might get better doesn’t last long before Dyer’s cheerful taxi driver Colin realizes that his passenger, Mr. Sood, is so miserable that he is an indescribable wretch; He’s so distraught that one of his minions, back at the office, breaks into rap, singing “he’s got a face like a bulldog chewing on a wasp.”

At this point most of the audience has now come to the terrible realization that the Christmas Karma is going to get much, much worse.

Given the intense competition, it’s hard to decide what the film’s most ridiculous, cringe-worthy, poorly thought-out moment is.

This could be the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Future, played by a clearly unsettled Boy George. He has a goatee and a tattered black robe and looks slightly bemused, as if he had been told that the party was a flashy outfit but it wasn’t, and was forced to spend the rest of the night looking like a crow.

Given the intense competition, it’s hard to decide what the film’s most ridiculous, cringeworthy and ill-considered moment is.

Perhaps the confused tone is more of an expression of surprise, as George states that his career has taken him from Karma Chameleon to Christmas Karma.

The other three ghosts could also be forgiven for wondering what had prompted them to sign up. Bonneville as Marley, Mr. Sood’s long-dead business partner, is portrayed with some very strange CGI.

Then there’s Longoria in her bizarre Day of the Dead outfit, and Broadway star Billy Porter as the Ghost of Christmas Present, with a lavish green gown and matching eye shadow, looking like she’s stepped out of a nightmare, which I honestly think she is.

Anyway, if you know the story (and if you don’t, I recommend the 1992 classic The Muppet Christmas Carol, which is several thousand times superior to this nonsense) you’ll know the impact of all these ghosts.

Mr. Sood realizes his mistake and, in the spirit of generosity, rewards his faithful clerk Bob Cratchit (Leo Suter), wins over Mrs. Cratchit (Pixie Lott) and saves the life of their disabled son Tim.

Meanwhile, the seemingly poor Cratchites live in one of the colorful houses in Notting Hill, which probably costs around £3 million and is worth a fortune just to rent.

Also, no self-respecting loser like Mr. Sood would ever take a black cab when Ubers were around. Christmas Karma gets things terribly wrong, even on the details, and let’s not get started on its mid-November release date.

The good thing about this is that, insofar as it deserves to be immortalized alongside 1964’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (another bad idea) as one of the worst Christmas movies of all time, it will surely be forgotten once the festive season gets around properly.