dir. John Whitesell
With Holidate, humankind finally has a movie brave enough to acknowledge the desperate pain and shame we all fear if we don’t have a date on Cinco de Mayo. The premise – generic white woman Sloane meets generic white man Jackson, and the two agree to be each other’s dates for holidays so they won’t be needled for being single – falls apart as soon as it’s apparent the duo aren’t even pretending to be a couple. They instead outwardly tell everyone they’re performing a “holidate” ritual, ergo are still needled for being single, destroying the entire point of their actions and indeed the whole movie. Meanwhile the main characters are thoroughly objectionable from start to end, casually sailing through shoplifting, deceit, sheer cruelty, and eerily light-hearted references to sexually active 12-year-olds. The attempts at humour are obnoxious and every single character is a tired cliché, from the promiscuous aunt to the wallflower sister-in-law. Holidate is so fundamentally irritating that by its end, the audience won’t even have the energy to ask why on earth anyone would ever need a date for Mother’s Day.
BMDb 