Wine and...Movies: CHRISTMAS RUSH (2002)

The Tucker and Dale vs. Evil of Die Hard rip-offs except oh wait no it f***ing isn't. You're gonna need to drink something fortified with this one.

I am going to fall victim to the usual online human foible of being more motivated to write about something I disliked than I am something I loved. Mea culpa, but this was a fun one to write about, lemme tell ya.

TRIGGER WARNING: There will be a lot of taking Christian moralizing to task in this post.

CHRISTMAS RUSH follows ex-thief and father, Scalzetti (Eric Roberts), who is desperate to save the life of his child, a boy who requires a bone marrow transplant to the insane tune of $250,000 - because health insurance won't cover ex-cons. He gathers together a cohort of talented miscreants (aka people with foreign accents and people of color) to pull of a Christmas heist, hijacking a shopping mall's "Christmas Rush" / last weekend haul. They plan to do it quietly and violence-free. The mall has the money insured in any event, and a child's life will be saved.

But local maverick cop, Lt. Cornelius Morgan (Dean Cain), recently suspended for excessive use of force, stumbles upon the plan when he arrives at the mall to apologize to his wife (Erika Eleniak) who he'd patronized earlier that day right after complaining that saying "Merry Christmas" was no longer "politically correct". Morgan resorts to gun-totting violence immediately, killing his first robber when the guy wasn't even a threat in that moment. He then kills again and again as the crew responds to the death of one their own, and the maniac cop trying to slaughter them while smarmily quipping lines like he was in an 80's action vehicle.

Dean CAIN playing Lt. CORNELIUS. MORGAN. Did they realize he had nothing but names of fictional villains / anti-heroes? This movie didn’t seem to realize a lot of things it does.

At one point Morgan loses his handgun, but finds a larger shotgun which he can use to kill more people and declares "There is a Santa Claus!"

He puts his wife's life at risk repeatedly (alongside the other "hostages" which are really just a handful of people cuffed in a room to keep them out of the way while the heist occurs.) When he hears the story behind why the heist is happening, he says "I'm sorry about that, but you should have gone straight! Three strikes and you're out! What your son needs is a father who isn't in jail!" Just an insane litany of asinine statements that dribble from his mouth like a case of Self-Righteousness Tourette's (SRT).

When a fellow cop arrives in the final act and says "What the fuck are you doing? This was the easiest score ever!" and sure this cop was crooked but also on point so Morgan shoots him. Morgan's wife does, too.

Essentially, this is the TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL of maverick cop/Die Hard ripoffs, except wait no it fucking isn't because this movie is, in fact, on the side of Dean Cain's Lt. Morgan and can't seem to grasp what an INSANELY, JAW-DROPPINGLY sociopathic hero it's set up, or how purely sympathetic all of its "bad guys" are.¹

Directed and written by the writer of BLIND FURY (1989) and GYMKATA (1985), though he went from here to make exclusively Christian idolatry fare. He and Cain are people who can't understand why most of humanity struggles to even say "thoughts and prayers" when the CEO of a health insurance company is murdered.

Eric roberts as the ostensible “bad guy”, but anyone with a working moral center is going to be rooting for him every step of the way.

Brief Essay

Christmas Rush is well made - the cinematography is surprisingly good, as are the practical effects and action bits. But it is the worst, most glaring example of Christian moralizing in truth being the morals of the wealthy ruling classes.

You could call this "capitalism", though historically the people in charge have also been royalty or purely religious organizations and not necessarily the merchant classes. However, whomever was in charge, they were never poor, or even just moderate in means. And Christianity, as a practicing religion, outside of its initial founding, has always moralized for their rulers, whenever their rulers supported them in turn.

In Christmas Rush, as well as in Christian-dominant societies, killing is always wrong…unless it's done in the name of war or otherwise by "authorities", unless its done as denial of health care or denial of basic housing and food needs. Robbery is always wrong, unless its done through manipulation of financial markets and lobbying government to make laws that allow for it. If the ruling classes aren't calling it wrong, then it's not. If they are, then it is.

Christmas Rush rarely shows anyone buying anything and never talks about its morality or ethics in terms of pure materialism. Yet it is the most crassly commercial Christmas movie I've ever seen.

The audacity of attempting to steal money (INSURED money!) is worth shooting anyone dead for, worth putting the lives of others at risk rather than let them get away with it. When it's revealed what the purpose of the robbery is in the movie (saving the life of a child because insurance companies won't), the life of said child is simply a sad, must-be-accepted reality but "robbery" is still wrong, always, period, the end.

People in Christian-dominant societies often believe "crime" to be on the rise, though they rarely think murders or assaults are on the rise. They think shoplifting is, subway fare skipping, break-ins, essentially petty theft, and they care more about this than nearly any other issue no matter how dire those other issues may be. America has just re-elected an autocrat to hopefully pay less for material things, and my own state California just kicked out a reformist District Attorney for one who promised to get "tough on crime". The crimes? Shoplifting and drug abuse. When it's baked into your history, it's so easy to relapse. Christian capitalist morality is something we are desperately trying to escape the event horizon of, but the sheer power it's going to take to release ourselves from its pull is on a scale we haven’t managed to date.

And so, for the above reasons, while I recognize Christmas Rush as a well enough made action movie, even surprisingly so for a TBS Original movie, I cannot accept that is holds any value or worth to any viewer, nor can I assist in the promulgation of its viewing and hence its viewpoints. At least, not without hopefully pre-biasing any potential viewer toward not accepting ANY of its precepts. Because they are fucking loathsome.

Paired With…?

Believe it or not, so long as you don’t walk away thinking Dean Cain’s character is a hero, I think you should watch Christmas Rush. It’s solid, the performances are shockingly top notch - the villains are SO LIKEABLE!!! Everyone except Dean Cain should be in a different, better scripted movie.

And what better to drink with a Christian-driven, Christmas-themed flick like this than a wine made from the Mission grape - the first vitis vinefera (wine grape) to be brought to the Americas by Spanish missionaries back in the 16th century. They ued the grape to made sacremental, table, and fortified wine.

These days, you can find the grape under the names Pais (Chile), Criollo Chica (Argentina), and of course just plain ol’ Mission when it’s used in the utterly delicious fortified dessert wine called ANGELICA.

This is a highly sweet, luscious gem of a wine. Ususally made like Port, with some fermentation occuring in the base wine which is then halted by adding brandy to the mix², leaving a lot of residual sugar behind while the brandy adds an extra amount of alcohol. Often, the brandy used is also made from the Mission grape! The wine is then barrel aged for a long time, usually decades.

Not all winemakers who produce a bottle labeled “Angelica” use the mission grape, so make sure to do your research before buying! But a couple great examples:

Glunz Family Winery NV MISSION ANGELICA - One of the most affordable bottles of real Angelica out there at only $35 / per half bottle!

Miraflores NV ANGELICA - This price point is more common, in the $50 - $100 / per half bottle range.

You’re going to want the fortification to put up with the off-putting moralizing in Christmas Rush, but you can still celebrate the history of Christian missionaries and the commerical holiday they eventually spewed onto us by drinking some mission wine. (If you’d rather drink something lighter and less fortified, I highly recommend J. Bouchon’s Pais Salvaje - mission grapes grown on wild rain forrest vines! Get the one that specifically states “Salvaje” [“Wild”] as those grapes have a spicier, more interesting flavor to them.)

1. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is a movie that flips the script of teen horror flicks, where well-to-do teenagers journey to the bible belt or heartland or swampland, etc. only to encounter deranged, muderous hillbilly monsters. In TaDvE, the hillbillies are trying to help save the kids, but the kids are so convinced that these guys are murderous hillbillies they wind up killing themselves in increasingly outlandish ways. Christmas Rush *reads* like it’s flipping the script on maverick cop action movies, with the robbers relatively decent people and the maverick cop plainly a self-rigteous, murderous ass, but alas, the movie is deadly (pun intended) serious in being a generic Die-Hard ripoff. The creators don’t seem to have understood what it is they’d created, cuz Christian-capitalist morals.

2. Sometimes, brandy will be added pre-fermentation, halting fermentation of the grape juice all-together! Which leaves a LOT of residual sugar in the resulting product, which is, essentially, brandy-infused grape juice, kinda technically doesn’t even count as a “wine” as the juice was never fermented.