Film Review: 'Thanksgiving With the Carters'

The Carter family's Thanksgiving dinner comes with a tradition attached to it known as the "Thanksgiving Surprise". Every year, each member of the family brings a surprise (whether big or small) to the gathering. This year, as the Carters come together for their annual feast, some surprises are in the works. Robert (Byron Adrian Shorter) is introducing his girlfriend Opal (Kelsey Delemar) to the family. Patriarch Errol (Kenneth Madison) has some plans to announce over dinner. Even Sydney (Aniya Langston), the young daughter of lawyer Erica (Sophia Knolton), has been getting on the Thanksgiving Surprise tradition.

But for this year, aspiring reporter Sydney is looking to do more than just paint another picture. She has a much bigger project in the works: finding out who her father is. Her investigation leads her to successful lawyer Jeffrey Davidson (Bryan G. Thompson), but is she right? And what other revelations will this Thanksgiving get-together bring?

From the above poster and synopsis, you would think Thanksgiving With the Carters is a wacky dramedy akin to Tyler Perry's Madea films. This is further supported by Maverick Films' tagline for the movie when they posted it on their YouTube channel: "Too Much Funny for One Room!" (video can be found here). But after watching it, I found that Thanksgiving With the Carters was far too lacking in raucous humor to compare to Tyler Perry's repertoire. In fact, the film has so little comedy that such moments stick out as odd. Instead, Thanksgiving With the Carters is a watered-down version of the family drama portion of a Madea film, with all the bland and uninteresting story beats that such a description implies.

Despite the advertising suggesting the Carter family will be a wild clan with lots of juicy dirt amongst them, there's hardly that much drama to be had either. Most of Thanksgiving With the Carters is spent on establishing backstories and long conversations between members of the titular family. While some of these scenes are worth watching for the solid character interactions, they all either drag on for longer than necessary or are just plain tedious. There is a central conflict involving Sydney's father, but thanks to the film's bizarre focus, it hardly has time to grow. The opening introduces Sydney's search for her father, only for the plot point to then be completely ignored until the final act. It's an odd way to structure a story, and the fact that said story is so painfully predictable and presented in the dullest way possible doesn't help.

But even before its story begins to take form, I had a bad feeling that Thanksgiving With the Carters was going to be a clinker. It's ironic how a character at one point notes that she and her boyfriend are finally having a real conversation "without loud music drowning out our voices". Because throughout much of the film, the sound design is horrifically wonky. Dialogue almost consistently comes with a strange echo, and it sometimes gets bad enough to make lines unintelligible. With the music alternating between distractingly loud and hopelessly generic (sometimes both), Thanksgiving With the Carters is definitely not a festive treat for the ears. It's also got some camerawork issues--moments of unexplainable blurriness and lighting shifts--that make it a similarly uneven visual experience.

Most of the characters are about as flat and uninspired as the story, with performances to match. They're the standard array of characters you see in these sorts of family dramas: the sassy but wise matriarch, the stern no-nonsense father, the driven careerwoman, etc. Sydney Carter, though, stands out as a particularly disappointing character. From how she's pictured in the poster, you'd think she'd inherit her grandmother's feisty sass and be fun to watch in action. Instead, she's an annoyingly precious little girl archetype, with the flat and whiningly cloying inflection Aniya Langston gives to all her lines only further grating my nerves. The only time she gives it a rest is for Sydney's emotional scene towards the end, and even then, the scene comes too late and doesn't focus on her nearly enough to give her time to redeem herself.

Most of the cast members around Langston are only marginally better, with Sophia Knolton's stiff performance being noteworthy thanks to Erica Carter's status as the film's arguable female lead. Opal stood out to me as the most interesting and fun character of the film, with Kelsey Delemar bringing an appealing charm to Opal's lovable spirit and "fly-on-the-wall" commentary about the Carter family dinner. Sharing in Delemar's ability to bring something compelling to a cookie-cutter character are Reaco Boyd as the fierce-but-loving Angela and Byron Adrian Shorter as beleaguered son and aspiring musician Robert.

Kenneth Madison also does well enough as strict father Errol, but his plot arc causes his character to leave a bitter taste in my mouth. After being introduced as an overly demanding father who refuses to accept "mediocrity" (which, for him, seems to be anything even slightly below perfection), you'd think the movie would be setting him up to learn a lesson. But while both Robert and Errol's mentee Omar (played by Philip Wrencher) get the opportunity to stand up for themselves against Errol's treatment, Errol never appears to learn anything from it or change for the better by the time the film ends. Even worse, when a secret comes out about Erica's past, Errol adds "hypocritical" to his list of unlikable traits by asking without a hint of self-awareness why she felt the need to be perfect. At best, it's poor character writing. At worst, it's the film standing in support of overly demanding and borderline emotionally abusive parents like Errol.

(Another reason why Opal stands out as my favorite character from Thanksgiving With the Carters: she's the only person at the dinner to defend Omar when Errol goes into a tirade over him getting a B in his French class)

Last year, I employed the same method of choosing a Thanksgiving feature to review that I used this year: searching "Thanksgiving" on Tubi and choosing the first movie that caught my eye. Best Thanksgiving Ever, for all its problems, was still a fairly entertaining watch. Thanksgiving With the Carters, however, is almost depressing in how generic and personality-starved it is. The story is a cobbled-together mess of blandly presented tropes, much of the cast seems to be acting on autopilot, and the production values make parts of this tiresome film difficult to even understand. So if you're looking for a feel-good Thanksgiving movie to watch after your festivities, check out Freeform's Turkey Drop or even Hallmark's A Family Thanksgiving. Either would make for a better watch than this burnt turkey.

Score: 2.5 out of 10 craisins.