I think it was Australia’s Dorothea Mackellar, and her famous poem, My Country, that starts with the lines;
‘I love a sunburnt Santa. A sleigh of flaking paint. Of sweaty reindeer herd. Of hot, and bothered strain.’
Or at least she would have done, if her Christmas spirit had been a little bloody higher… I’m, a, quite proud of that one 😊
In A Sunburnt Christmas, Darryl Dunn (Daniel Henshall) is on the run from a Bible-bashing Terminator, hunting him down for some money he stole – not really; the guy chasing Darryl is actually just an angry bloke named Dingo (Sullivan Stapleton) who owns a fish market, but I like my description better. Darryl nicks a Santa suit, and disguises himself as a rural relief Santa Claus, to drive across the South Australian boarder in search of buried loot. He crashes into a farm shed, and awakes Daisy (Lena Nankivell), a little girl he convinces that he is the real Santa Claus. Swearing to secrecy, that she won’t tell a soul, Daisy quickly tells her brother Tom (Eadan McGuinness), and her older sister Hazel (Tatiana Goode) who is looking after the farm the best she can, despite it being close to foreclosure. Hazel agrees to help Santa Darryl find the buried money, so long as they split it and he doesn’t cause any trouble. A Sunburnt Christmas is directed by Christiaan Van Vuuran.
If for nothing else, A Sunburnt Christmas may give us the worst nurse in movie history – in the opening scene, she declares Darryl ‘out cold’ before he springs out of bed as soon as the policeman has left the room. I expected this nurse to be in on a con, and become a big part of the following proceedings, but nope, she is never seen again. Imagine being the extra who won that role, reading your one line in the script, and concluding, ‘so you want me to look like the biggest nong ever.’ Anyway, I digress…
It’s hard not to root for Hazel once you get to know her. She’s tough; carrying the burden of the farm, caring for a couple of weirdo siblings, and an emotionally absent mother. A Sunburnt Christmas starts out with the best that wacky Australian humour has to offer, with fantastic vivacious energy, but becomes heavy; probably heavier than it needs to be for a Christmas movie, and I wonder who would be the best demographic for this movie’s audience. I liked it; when Daisy ignites those jumper leads, that’s the hardest I’ve laughed in a movie all year. And just the vision of Daisy shooting a shotgun into the sky and falling backwards, will probably keep me smiling for months to come – yeah, she’s the cutest little kid, beyond compare. Considering the top-notch and totally quirky introductions for these kids, Daisy and Tom hardly take up much of the films total running time in the end, as Darryl moves to interact more with Hazel and the children’s mother Fiona (Ling Cooper Tang). I found Darryl to be an attractively earnest and lovable guy – like a sharper and cleaner Tyler Labine (especially in Sons of Tucson; an actor you’d know if you saw him), which is ironic, considering Darryl is absolutely filthy in this movie; I was surprised nobody offered him a wash, but then I remembered the farm’s in draught.
The deeper the movie goes, the more it touches on serious matters, of drug use, grief, suicide and criminal activity, but it does an excellent job at getting us to care about this family, who do want Dingo’s stolen money for themselves; but I guess Dingo is a drug distributor, so screw him. The movie then takes a leaf out of the Jungle2Jungle handbook when it comes to getting a big baddie out of your home too, so if you’re into that… And A Sunburnt Christmas takes a few twists and turns, with one last big revelation that I’d considered and thought, ‘I hope they don’t’, but then they do… and I don’t know, not everything has to be related, but I won’t let it spoil a good time.
When I see an Australian movie, there’s still a part of me that hopes it’s going to accurately represent Aussie culture to the world’s stage. But it’s stupid of me, because who doesn’t know what Australia is by now, and who cares what anyone else thinks as long as it’s a good movie. And I’m sure ‘Aussie’ culture is just as variable as anywhere else in the world. So what I’m describing is vanity, really, and by calling myself out here, I’m giving myself a metaphoric slap on the wrist. But happy and satisfying moments that this movie supplies, are the inclusions of iconic Australian Christmas songs like ‘How to Make Gravy’ by Paul Kelly, or ‘White Wine in the Sun’ by Tim Minchin. I’m glad the movie acquired the rights to include these songs immensely. I came across the release date for A Sunburnt Christmas whilst researching ‘Australian Christmas movies’, under the assumption that Australia doesn’t have all that many – we value How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Home Alone on our free-to-air television stations every year, and other movies featuring locations blanketed in snow, where in actual fact, we have long hot summer December evenings. A Sunburnt Christmas is definitely in the spirit of the type of Christmas movies I’d like to see more often, and exactly what we need. I quite enjoyed A Sunburnt Christmas, and I’d hope you would too.
3.5
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