Disaster Holiday 2024 Movie Review
Every Christmas, we are reminded that family is important. Yet, to support that family, bread has to be put on the table. Balancing work and family can be difficult, especially for Joseph Ngema. This South African marketing executive for toilet paper company Roll With It pretends that nothing is wrong with him, his children and his ex-wife. When he has to cancel a family vacation at the last minute to turn it into a work trip, all his problems come to the surface in a supposedly funny way.
Joseph is a workaholic, but it seems a miracle that he managed to keep a job at all. After all, the father of three looks more like an eight-year-old boy than a grown man. Unfortunately, his work environment is also overly childish, which immediately results in an awkward and unfunny scene. Here it turns out that Joseph either has to give an important pitch or loses his job. Because this scene, which sets the plot and tone of the rest of the film in motion, tries to be overly funny, it is difficult to take the film itself seriously.
For a comedy family film this is generally not so bad, but it does make the serious moments of Disaster Holiday fall away a bit. In addition, the humor is not funny enough to compensate for the loss of seriousness. This is a shame, because the film does have a nice message. Joseph thinks he is the best father for his children, because he makes sure they don’t miss anything. He wants this, because he himself did not have much money when he was younger. However, this makes him much too busy to really be a present father to his children.
This is said to Joseph by several characters, but also shown in more subtle ways. For example, he constantly gets the ages of his three children wrong and forgets several times to check whether his youngest is in the car. After all the wild adventures of the film, Joseph finally admits to those around him that he was wrong, but the real star of the show is an earlier scene with his eldest daughter. Here his “funny” nature takes a step back and he can actually have a serious conversation with his daughter.
The kids themselves are the best part of the film. They may be a bit cliché and many of their comments are predictable, but their relationship with each other feels believable and is actually funny at times. They also all have at least one unique chuckle-worthy comment or facial expression, which makes the film surprising and entertaining at times.
Disaster Holiday does build up its (attempts at) humor quite well at times. Sometimes the payoffs of set-up jokes are predictable, like when Joseph gets the spare tire out of the car and later there is no spare tire left. Other times the setup does come back in a surprising way. This is the case with, for example, the sibling fight over a phone at the beginning of the film. The best pay-off comes from a brief comment about a dancing traffic cop early in the film, because it comes back completely unexpectedly in the climax.
Although this comedy family film is not really funny, it does succeed in the ‘family film’ part. The Ngema family manages to save everything at the last minute by working together. An important factor in this is Nandi, Joseph’s new wife and stepmother of the three children. Usually stepmothers are portrayed negatively in stories, but Nandi only has love for her husband and her stepchildren. The mutual relationships between the family members form the strength of the film and it is nevertheless somewhat heartwarming to see how this disastrous holiday still becomes a nice one.
