A movie titled Jingle Bell Heist sounds like a slam dunk on paper — a Christmas heist with festive chaos, romantic tension, and comedic high stakes. What could possibly go wrong?
As it turns out, almost everything.

Despite its title, Jingle Bell Heist is barely a heist movie at all. Instead, it settles comfortably — and disappointingly — into the same formulaic mold as the lowest-budget Christmas romances clogging Hallmark’s backlog… just wrapped in holiday glitter and marketed as something far more exciting.

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⭐ What is Jingle Bell Heist About?

Two strangers team up to rob London’s biggest department store during peak holiday shopping season — and inevitably fall in love in the process.

On paper, that’s a fun genre mash-up.
In execution, it’s a lifeless reheat of holiday tropes we’ve all seen before.

The film tries to echo the warm emotional beats of Richard Curtis, but its script — from writers Abby McDonald and Amy Reed — leans hard into melodrama rather than sincerity. The characters’ motives (a cancer-stricken mother and a looming custody battle) are designed purely for cheap sentimentality rather than depth, and the film’s attempts to wring emotion out of tragedy only highlight how hollow the storytelling truly is.

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⭐ A Romantic Heist Without Chemistry… or Energy

The core problem with Jingle Bell Heist is that the romance is supposed to be the movie — yet the leads share no chemistry whatsoever.

• Connor Swindells (Sex Education, Barbie) has demonstrated charisma and screen presence before, but you’d never know it here.
• Olivia Holt turns in a performance that feels phoned in from an entirely different movie — and a mediocre one at that.

Together, the dynamic is flat, forced, and limp — which is disastrous when everything in the story depends on the audience rooting for the couple.

But even that pales in comparison to the film’s most unforgivable flaw:
it has no energy.

Holiday movies should sparkle.
Heist movies should buzz with adrenaline.
Somehow, this manages neither.

The entire production is painfully generic — the commercial dystopia of a department store dressed in plastic Christmas spirit — and director Michael Fimognari fails to compensate with creativity in camera work, editing, pacing, or soundtrack. It plays like an algorithm-generated romantic comedy shot through a soft focus filter of creative exhaustion.

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⭐ Is Jingle Bell Heist Worth Watching?

No.

Jingle Bell Heist is one of the worst Netflix Originals of the year, an unholy fusion of:

• the most cynical clichés of Hallmark holiday movies
• the most saccharine tendencies of a late-career Richard Curtis script
• and the visual and emotional lifelessness of a straight-to-streaming production

It’s the kind of film that makes 90 minutes feel like a punishment, not entertainment. Dare I say it… it almost made me want to cancel my Netflix subscription. And I don’t even pay for Netflix — it’s bundled with my phone plan.

Unless you’re studying how to assemble an algorithm-optimized disaster in real time, this movie is skippable in every sense of the word.

Jingle Bell Heist is now streaming on Netflix.