Elf Me Review: With November closing down its final chapters soon, Amazon Prime Video has brought us yet another Christmas movie to add to the Holiday cheer. Starring Federico Ielapi as Elia, Pasquale Petrolo as Trip, and Anna Foglietta as Ivanna in lead roles, the Italian movie also sports the talents of actors Claudio Santamaria, Giorgio Pasotti, Caterina Guzzanti, Francesco Liso, Giulietta Rebeggiani, Linda Zampaglione, Vincenzo Sebastiani and others.
Created by Gabriele Mainetti, Giovanni Gualdoni, Leonardo Ortolani, Marcello Cavalli, the movie has a runtime of 1 hour and 39 minutes, and has been directed by YouNuts. The family fantasy adventure film is now streaming on Prime Video with English subtitles and even dubbed audio (and other languages) for international audiences.
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Elf Me Movie Review Contains No Spoilers
Elf Me Review
With its close-knit cast panel, the new Amazon Prime Video Christmas movie offers you the straightforward Holiday-season mess with fantastical characters from the North Pole colliding into the real world where they’re deemed “not real”. We’ve all seen a movie like this before, and some may even be reminded of the loveable animated film from 2012, Rise of the Guardians. However, Elf Me is not nearly as heartfelt, nor does it dare to explore themes like the former did. Nevertheless, it’s still a simple jolly addition to the roster of X-mas movies.
It follows an unconventional elf, named Trip, as such movies commonly do, who’s only ended up adding more problems to the existing heaps on the shoulders of Santa Claus, a mystical figure who chooses to stay in the background and out of sight too for most of the film like the lady in Tom and Jerry cartoon series. Instead of supporting the cause as Santas’s little helper, Trip has mostly invented bizarre and rather violent tools instead of preparing easy-to-like toys like others. Fate then leads him to meet Elia, a shy boy whose ultimate Christmas wish is for him to be reunited with his father, whose been out of the picture for some time now for reasons unknown.
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A gang of bullies starts pursuing the young boy, which is when he finds some help through Trip’s otherwise disastrous company while they also unconventionally dig into discovering the meaning of friendship. On top of this friendly and familial concoction, the movie being a Christmas number, pulls out a local villain without raising the stakes any further. In that way, all characters and the plot progression are something that we’ve all witnessed elsewhere before, but even then this familiarity isn’t fully a red flag for it endows you with a sense of stability and security in these themes spun out by a Holiday-themed and snow-decked storyline.
Even while introducing the characters to us, the film touches up on some personal details that aren’t significantly dug into later on, nor do they add any depth to these roles, except slightly humanising them in some cases. Some antagonists reveal not so villainous sides to themselves eventually, but the finale ultimately explodes, quite literally, in the same way these movies usually do before reinstating a calm status quo.
The cast members do their bit to bring alive these archetypal characters, and the cinematography adequately sparks the screen with enough magic without garnishing any unique lights or something out of the ordinary. The plot is equally driven on emotional and personal notes, especially for the main characters, and through the overarching quest-defined traits of these characters’ journey. Pasquale Petrolo is of course a standout as Trip, but the film could’ve been a lot more meaningful if there was more to the characters, apart from what’s already been laid out by previously tested waters.
Elf Me Amazon Prime Video Movie: Final Thoughts
The first thing to ask about movies like this is that if they’ve introduced us to anything new at all. To answer that question, Elf Me movie doesn’t attempt to go over and beyond what’s already been spelled out by a dozen releases from the same category. However, it’s not fully detestable, and you can still have some fun watching it if you allow yourself to by letting go of any pre-established expectations and thoughts. Sometimes, familiarity is a blissful escape too when it comes to these family dramas, and if seen from that viewpoint, this Prime Vide Original film is okay at best and easy to digest.
Elf Me is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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