Jingle Bell Heist (2025) Review – Festive Fraud Wrapped in Tinsel

• Film Title: Jingle Bell Heist (2025)
• Cast: Olivia Holt, Connor Swindells, Lucy Punch, Peter Serafinowicz, Poppy Drayton, Natasha Joseph, Michael Salami
• Director: Michael Fimognari
  Fimognari is best known for his work on the To All the Boys films, where he leans into glossy visuals, soft lighting, and heightened teen emotions. His stamp tends to be warm, polished cinematography and a focus on romantic fantasy over realism.
• Writers: Abby McDonald & Amy Reed
  Abby McDonald and Amy Reed both have backgrounds that brush against YA and rom-com territory, with a focus on character-driven drama.
• Distribution & Production: Distributed by Netflix as a holiday original, Jingle Bell Heist fits neatly into the platform’s strategy of yearly Christmas drops designed for repeat background play rather than long-term cultural impact.
• Release Date: 26 November 2025: Netflix (worldwide)
• Review by: Mother of Movies

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Jingle Bell Heist – Christmas Crime by Algorithm

Jingle Bell Heist (2025) arrived on Netflix looking like a candy-cane-coated mash-up of Christmas rom-com and caper movie. On paper, it’s the sort of thing Mother of Movies should inhale: revenge, a heist, twinkling lights, emotional stakes, and a London department store so festive it might as well be a shrine to capitalism.

Instead, it feels like the streaming equivalent of seasonal stock: decorative, lightly flavoured, and clearly manufactured to hit a Q4 (as in the last part of the year) content quota.

Sophia Martin (Olivia Holt) works two jobs and still can’t cover her mother’s cancer treatment. Between shifts at the lavish Sterling Department Store and hospital visits, she also moonlights as a pickpocket, lifting wallets, cash, and even a diamond dog collar with ease. The film presents all of this as morally clean from the opening minutes and never revisits that choice.

Her petty theft catches the eye of Nick O’Connor (Connor Swindells), a security contractor who installed the store’s surveillance and who was previously sent to prison after being framed for theft by the store’s owner, Maxwell Sterling (Peter Serafinowicz). Nick blackmails Sophia using the footage and ropes her into a revenge heist targeting Sterling’s secure locker.

A failed first attempt conveniently tees up a bigger score. A scapegoated security guard, Eddie, becomes collateral damage. Then the script escalates: Sterling apparently keeps £500,000 in a private safe, and Sophia pushes for a larger, riskier job.

Access requires a key fob held by Sterling’s estranged wife, Cynthia (Lucy Punch). At a Christmas party, Nick appears to seduce her for the key, only for Cynthia to reveal she already knows the plan and wants in. By the time Christmas Eve rolls around, the “heist” has turned into a tidy moral reset where everyone bad is punished, everyone good gets paid, and the film pats itself on the back.

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Genre Soup, Light on Flavour

Jingle Bell Heist behaves like it desperately wanted to hit multiple Netflix categories at once: “Christmas,” “romantic comedy,” “heist,” and maybe “feel-good crime” if that ever becomes a thing.

In practice, though, it has:

• Very little action
• Very little comedy
• Almost no romance

It talks like a revenge heist, dresses like a Christmas rom-com, and walks out the door like a Hallmark movie. The final kiss between Sophia and Nick is the weirdest part of this personality crisis. Nothing in the preceding 90-odd minutes earns that intimate moment. There’s no flirtatious build, no emotional push-and-pull, no meaningful shift from blackmail to affection. As someone who’s happily soft for a good romance, Mother of Movies found nothing remotely swoon-worthy here.

The film looks at the post-pandemic Christmas content economy, where every platform pumps out “holiday originals” like they’re limited-edition advent calendars, and shrugs:

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“That, but minimum effort.”

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Pacing Like a PowerPoint Deck

The editing is where the seams fully split. The first act is painfully slow, but somehow the overall film still feels rushed, an impressive paradox if you’re in the mood for frustration.

We hop between:

• Apartment
• Hospital
• Department store
• Street

Ethics on Holiday

Where the movie really lost me was its ethics. Jingle Bell Heist wants to live in that cosy eat-the-rich space, but without doing the work.

The film quietly asks for acceptance of:

• Going into debt for cancer treatment is just a normal Christmas plot device
• Stealing is fine if the victim is wealthy or unlikable
• The ends always justify the means, no questions asked

Sophia’s moral compass is framed as unproblematic. She decides who “deserves” to be robbed. There’s no tension, no self-doubt, no reckoning with the fact that she’s not only stealing from villains but also collateral people whose finances we never see. Given the very real global cost-of-living crises and healthcare nightmares, there was space here to say something sharp or bitter or at least conflicted. Instead, the film opts for a frictionless fantasy where crime plus Christmas equals catharsis.

Nick’s motives are more convincing. He actually did time for a crime he didn’t commit, so his desire for revenge and vindication has merit. If the film had leaned into his rage, his trauma, and his sense of injustice, there might have been some emotional bite. Instead, his arc gets flattened into yet another cog in the tidy feel-good machine.

Convenience Over Craft

The heists themselves are not clever. They’re convenient. Suspense appears for three seconds and is immediately strangled by coincidence.

The late reveal that Sophia is Maxwell Sterling’s illegitimate daughter, able to open a biometric lock because the safe literally recognises her, should be a gasp moment. Instead, it lands like a narrative cheat code. Combine that with Cynthia’s twist, planting insurance-fraud evidence in Sterling’s own safe. The entire third act feels less like a daring crime and more like cosmic admin: paperwork rearranged, villains neatly arrested, everyone else absolved.

What Actually Works

Sterling Department Store looks gorgeous on screen. Soaring ceilings, a hallway lined with decorated Christmas trees, and an overload of baubles create a convincing festive temple to consumption. The production design delivers the kind of glossy Christmas vibe you can leave playing while you doom-scroll.

The jazzy transitional music between scenes fits the caper-adjacent aesthetic nicely. It gives the illusion of energy when the script doesn’t.

Costume-wise, the caper outfits are a strange highlight. The black-and-white striped get-ups evoke cartoon cat burglars and old-school jailbird uniforms. Whether intentional or not, they’re amusing enough to stick in the mind.

The performances are not the problem. Olivia Holt, Connor Swindells, Lucy Punch, and Peter Serafinowicz all turn in solid work. No one is phoning it in. It’s the script that abandons them, offering thin characterisation and dialogue that never digs below surface-level exposition.

Final Verdict – For the Christmas Desperate Only

Mother of Movies loves revenge tales, dark humour, romance, and Christmas films. Jingle Bell Heist should have been a cosy seasonal indulgence. Instead, it plays like a film made out of obligation: pretty, shallow, and oddly pleased with itself.

If you’re catastrophically low on Christmas content and need something to play in the background while you wrap presents or rage at your heating (or in Australia, your cooling) bill, Jingle Bell Heist is passable wallpaper. As a film, though, Mother of Movies can’t recommend it.

Jingle Bell Heist is rated
1 hollow Christmas caper out of 5

Similar Titles – Need More Seasonal Mischief?

Need more? Movies like Jingle Bell Heist are:

• The Holiday Calendar (2018) – Netflix Christmas magic, light on stakes, heavy on cosy clichés.
• Operation Christmas Drop (2020) – Military-adjacent holiday goodwill with more heart than heist.
• Love Hard (2021) – Catfishing at Christmas with rom-com beats that at least feel earned.
• The Princess Switch (2018) – Identity shenanigans, royal vibes, saccharine but committed to the bit.
• Carry-On (2024) – A Netflix hijacking movie starring Jason Bateman.
• Silent Bite (2024) – A heist, with Vampires at Christmas. This film is a horror.

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Spoiler Free Verdict

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