Netflix is releasing yet another holiday romance this week with the aggressively shirtless new drop, The Merry Gentlemen. The film is about a Broadway dancer who returns to her hometown and finds her parents’ struggling bar in need of better marketing campaign, and starts up an all-male dance revue. Britt Robertson stars as the dancer-turned-choreographer, and Chad Michael Murray and is the handyman-turned-sex-object-I-mean-dancer who stars in the show. If you liked Magic Mike but wish it focused more a small town coming together to save a small business, this is the film for you.
Opening Shot: Christmas in New York. Overhead, city bustles and twinkles, and somewhere in Manhattan, a holiday dance revue called The Jingle Belles (think Rockettes without the naming rights) prepare for a performance.
The Gist: One of these Jingles Belles is Ashley Davis, played by Britt Robertson, and she doesn’t know it yet, but this performance will be her last. Ashley, who has been dancing with the show for 12 years, is fired (for being too old, although her boss can’t actually say that for legal reasons), so she decides to head to her hometown, Sycamore Creek, to spend Christmas with her parents Stan and Lily, played by Michael Gross (Mr. Keaton from Family Ties!) and Beth Broderick (Zelda from Sabrina the Teenage Witch!). They run a local bar called The Rhythm Room which has fallen into a bit of disrepair. The musical acts that once filled the place aren’t coming to perform there anymore, and as a result, the rent and utility bills are going unpaid and they find themselves $30,000 in debt. The upside is that the handyman, Luke (Chad Michael Murray) who’s helping out around the bar is very cute. (“He’s got those Hallmark handyman vibes,” the bartender, Troy, says, describing Luke.)
When the bar’s landlord shows up one day to let the family know that she’s planning to push them out so she can hand the lease over to a juice bar starting on January 1, Ashley reveals that there’s no way that can happen, and improvises a lie, explaining that she’s producing an all-male dance revue at the bar that will star (looks around, spots the handyman), Luke.
With just ten days to put the revue together, Ashley also recruits the bartender, Troy, and her brother-in-law, Rodger, to be dancers in the revue which she calls The Merry Gentlemen. They have a choreography crash course, and once the men learn their routine, the show opens to an enthusiastic but small crowd which soon grows thanks to word of mouth. And just as Ashley starts to fall in love with Luke, she gets a call from the Jingle Belles offering her her old job back and she’s forced to choose between the dream job she worked her whole life to get, or the new life she’s started to build and the man she’s started to fall for.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? While the furniture maker with a heart of gold and pecs of steel has already been done before with Magic Mike, there’s also a dash of Dirty Dancing thanks to the dance instruction montages, and snippets of Hallmark movies like My Sweet Austrian Holiday and‘Twas The Date Before Christmas which both have “we’ve got to save our small business before Christmas” themes.
Our Take: Have you always wanted to watch Magic Mike with your kids? Now you can! While The Merry Gentlemen seems a little derivative, it’s obviously its own film (and told from Ashley’s point of view) and the real focus is on the relationship that develops between Ashley and Luke.
Luke immediately writes Ashley off as a “city girl,” the type of person whose ambition was more enticing than her hometown and the people in it, which feels like an odd assumption to make about one of the millions of people who end up moving to New York City, until his own backstory reveals a broken marriage and an ex-wife who ran off to chase her own ambition in… New York City. But Sycamore Creek becomes the kind of small town that even city folk would be charmed by; the people are warm and welcoming, there’s an art scene, the people there are open-minded enough to flock to an all-male dance review in droves on Christmas Eve. The thing that makes nearly every movie like this one so appealing is the charm of the small town and the people in it, the ones who make you realize that you can still live your dream even if you don’t abscond to that isle of misfit toys known as Manhattan.
And what of the dancing? There is plenty of it. The film wastes little time making us wait for the dancers to take their shirts off, and while most of the men recruited for the show are absolutely ripped, things become a bit more equal-opportunity when an older man who sits at the bar every day is forced to fill in for one of the other dancers, and even though he’s not bulging and veiny, he’s still a crowd-pleaser. (Like Hot Frosty, the shirtlessness is what sets this film apart from so many other Hallmark and Netflix romances.) What makes the dance scenes so fun is the way the local crowd onscreen hoots and hollers, they’re like an applause button suggesting we should all be having the same reaction, and when they cheer for the men onstage, it’s hard not to want to cheer from home. Because if no one is cheering Christmas won’t be saved after all, and what’s the fun in that?
Sex and Skin: The Merry Gentlemen is rated PG for “mild themes” and I think the main theme is “men in above-the-waist states of undress.” I can’t even call it nudity, because it’s nothing you wouldn’t see on a public beach. There are a few gyrating pelvises and thrusts that, depending on your family, you may or may not want your kids to watch, but there’s nothing truly erotic to see here.
Parting Shot: Ashley and Luke kiss in front of the town square’s Christmas tree while her family and his fellow dancers look on.
Performance Worth Watching: Actress Marla Sokoloff, who is probably best known for her roles on The Practice, Dude, Where’s My Car? and, of course, as Joey’s pregnant sister Dina on Friends, stars as Ashley’s older sister Marie, and she offers the classic “older daughter” perspective here: supportive, all-knowing and offering Ashley the guidance she needs as she sorts through her emotions. (Sokoloff also wrote the screenplay for the film.)
Memorable Dialogue: “I have until Christmas to raise $30,000 or The Rhythm Room gets ripped away from my parents. I can’t let that happen,” Ashley explains in the “expositional dialogue that will be used the the trailer” scene.
Our Call: The Merry Gentlemen offers mild titillation thanks to the dance numbers and general shirtlessness that abounds throughout, and I think that’s why anyone is watching, am I right? The fact that Chad Michael Murray gives off Patrick Swayze in the Chippendales sketch vibes (regarding both his tuxedo cuffs and his piece-y blond hair) only works in this film’s favor, too. STREAM IT!
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.
