Stream It Or Skip It?

Sofia Carson has officially transitioned from Disney Princess to Queen of Netflix. The former Descendants and A Cinderella Story star has quietly nestled into Netflix’s algorithm as a go-to lead for romances, e.g., Purple Hearts, The Life List and latest endeavor My Oxford Year, adapted from Julia Whelan’s 2018 novel. Which is to say, the streamer wouldn’t be making these things if they weren’t likely to bullseye the wine-and-cheese-and-a-movie demographic and end up in Netflix’s Top 10. And that makes Carson a valuable commodity, just as the character she plays in Oxford is about to do some commodifying at a new Wall Street job – but not before she indulges her fetish for stale-smelling old books by spending a year studying poetry at the University of Oxford, where she meets a hot guy, ponders whether her true calling involves Goldman Sachs or John Keats, and finds herself trapped in two movies’ worth of cliches. 

The Gist: Everything is tidy: The bookshelf full of Brit lit, the suitcase packed with neatly folded clothes, the plan to smell a lot of books in Oxford libraries before returning to New York and contributing to the world’s late-capitalism ills as a financial analyst. Anna De La Vega (Carson) even has a checklist (do NOT call it a “life list” lest you risk confusing Sofia Carson-led list-based Netflix movies) of all the things she wants to do and see in England, meticulously handwritten in a little journal with boxes to tick off and everything. It’d be a shame if things didn’t go as planned, I thought to myself – and sure enough, about halfway through the movie, a conversation about “the best laid plans” occurred, confirming my assumption that this dramedy will unfold in a highly predictable manner.

But let’s not get too far ahead of the plot, because we have Moments of Awe in the Face of Really Old Buildings to work through, as well as the establishment of Eccentric Supporting Characters and a Meet-Cute/Frenemies dynamic. One of the first things on Anna’s list is to get fish ‘n’ chips (one assumes bangers ‘n’ mash is farther down the page), and she gets soaked by a jerk driving a sports car through a puddle right outside the shop, then meets the jerk in the shop, giving her the opportunity to show her integration into British culture by calling him a “bellend” and flipping him off with the two-fingers-up gesture. She catches on quick. Of course, the jerk turns up again, as the grad student teaching her poetry course. What a small college town London is! 

Anna attends class with her three new pals, Tom (Nikhil Parmar), Maggie (Esme Kingdom) and Charlie (Harry Trevaldwyn), who are all slightly weird but not weird enough to be interesting, and who all watch as Anna and the jerk, Jamie (Corey Mylchreest), banter in class. He has a reputation as an overmoneyed laddish sort with lots of ladyfriends in his wake. He lectures about the “despair, terror, wisdom, beauty and lust” in poetry, and of course all that will surface as he singles out Anna and eventually takes her to libraries that are older than America, which really get her revved up. Did I mention that Jamie seems to have a girlfriend (Poppy Gilbert)? Well, Jamie seems to have a girlfriend, but he and Anna end up smashing face outside during a British downpour anyway, a risky gambit considering Jamie’s eau de musty bound leather cologne might rinse off and disengage her pheromones. Things are just ducky between them – “This is just fun, right?”, sez Jamie – until Jamie starts pulling away for Reasons. There are always Reasons, and sometimes Reasons can transform a movie into an entirely different movie, but we needn’t spoil things.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, a couple of titles might ruin My Oxford Year’s big twist. So I’ll just say The Life List is a more satisfying Carson vehicle.

Performance Worth Watching: Dougray Scott plays Jamie’s father here, prompting one to ponder the cruelty and/or mercy of fate, which puts him third-billed in a Netflix generimovie a quarter-century after an injury on the set of M:I 2 forced him to drop out of X-Men and see Hugh Jackman play Wolverine ever since.

Memorable Dialogue: Anna steps into the fish ‘n’ chips shop:

Fish guy with a very heavy accent: Haddock?

Anna: A duck? No. Uh, fish.

Sex and Skin: Lite PG-13 horizontal bedsmooching.

Our Take: There are enough major coincidences (two) in the first nine minutes (I counted) of My Oxford Year to push us right out of contention for emotional engagement over the next (sigh) 103 minutes. That progress bar moves so slow sometimes, doesn’t it? But hey, at least the movie’s barely almost funny on occasion, until it reaches the point where it’s suddenly not, and it gets weighty and earnest, but not weighty and earnest enough to make us feel anything about these people and their predicaments. The characters are just too flimsy and the drama too predictable to inspire more than a tepid shrug.

And while I know real life isn’t linear and occasionally takes abrupt turns, the movie’s artificial nature renders it impossible to use such sentiment in an act of apoligism. And it’s at a hard left that My Oxford Year ceases being Anna’s story, and awkwardly shifts to her first-person POV of another character’s major life ordeal. Of course, major life ordeals are plump boiled hot dogs ripe and ready for the condiments of classic British poetry, the eternal and profound musings of Thoreau and Keats functioning as smatterings of ketchup and sweet relish on the tube steak thematic content of this movie. And there is no zingy horseradish mustard or exotic slaw on this condiment cart – the movie is as normie as phony, idealized Hollywood romances get. 

So we get staid rom-comisms (terribly sung Coldplay karaoke, the leads bonking heads during a moment of romantic tension, etc.) in the first half and watery weepy slop in the second, when the already uninspired antichemical romance – Carson is perpetually 22 and naive in all of her roles it seems, and Mylchreest’s performance here is 85 percent eyebrows – is fully drained of all its flavor. Such tonal vapidity is reflected in the would-be postcard cinematography, which is so flat and colorless, you might wonder if Carson was filmed standing in front of blown-up scans of magazine spreads featuring Oxford architecture. What we’re left with is vague, peabrained musings on the concepts of “temporary” and “forever,” the latter of which I was all too familiar with, since that’s about how long it took for this boring movie to reach its mercilessly apathetic conclusion.

Our Call: Take My Oxford Year, please! SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.