Nativity Rocks! This Ain’t No Silent Night: Christmas sequel pumps up the volume

Review: The fourth in the series is tolerable, but it’s like a tourist board ad for Coventry

Debbie Isitt's Nativity Rocks!
Debbie Isitt's Nativity Rocks!
Nativity Rocks!
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Director: Debbie Isitt
Cert: G
Genre: Family
Starring: Simon Lipkin, Daniel Boys, Craig Revel Horwood, Bradley Walsh, Meera Syal, Helen George, Ruth Jones, Celia Imrie, Hugh Dennis and Anna Chancellor
Running Time: 1 hr 40 mins

Coventry, as the fictional mayor of that place reminds us in Nativity Rocks, has survived bombing and rationing and poverty. But can it withstand a fourth film in the Nativity sequence?

The follow-up to the entirely risible Nativity 3: Dude, Where's My Donkey? has, in keeping with the other instalments, managed to lose B-list celebs between films. Over the years, Games of Thrones has lost fewer key players.

Out go Catherine Tate, Martin Clunes, and Mark Wootton; in come the transplants from Nativity, the musical theatre production. That's not a bad thing. Channelling Jack Black in School of Rock, West End star Simon Lipkin invests the proceedings with plenty of demented energy as a wacky man-child who teams up with a stray dog and a Syrian child refugee named Doru. Take that, Brexit Britain.

Mostly, the plot – insofar as one can use the word – concerns the staging of a rock opera so that the magnificent city of Coventry, which gets plenty of tourist board-friendly framing throughout, might be declared the most Christmassy city in the land.

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Along the way, neglectful executive parents Hugh Dennis and Anna Chancellor learn to be less neglectful, Strictly Come Dancing's Craig Revel Horwood flounces magnificently as a preening impresario, Doru searches for his estranged father, and everyone comes together to put on a spirited, if utterly baffling version of the birth of Jesus.

Characters come and go randomly – we’re still scratching our heads over Jessica Hynes’s late appearance. There’s a lot of chatter about family and Christmas and the magnificent city of Coventry – did we mention Coventry already?

It’s still marginally more tolerable than the last one.

Tara Brady

Tara Brady

Tara Brady, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a writer and film critic