'Ella McCay' Review: A Baffling and Incoherent Political Comedy-Drama From James L. Brooks
- Dan Bremner
- 14 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Dan Bremner - December 18, 2025
Here we finally are: the most ironically hyped release of 2025. A film so aggressively marketed you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the second coming of our lord and saviour himself (Charlie Whale). Instead, it arrives not with a bang, but with a sense of sheer confusion. James L. Brookes' Ella McCay was rightly panned on release and mercilessly mocked for its painfully forced publicity campaign, which culminated in The Simpsons shilling it to an almost surreal degree. Watching Lisa Simpson earnestly declare this her “favourite film ever” now feels like a sign of desperation. I went in cautiously optimistic, hoping for a light, screwball political comedy with a stacked cast and old-school charm. What I got was a baffling, joyless tonal disaster that collapses under the weight of its own indecision. Like Ella McCay herself, the film tries to juggle too much and drops absolutely everything.
Let’s address the most egregious crime first: she doesn’t even do the pose from the poster. It’s blatant false advertising and, frankly, Disney should be held legally accountable. If you’re going to build an entire marketing identity around a pose from the poster and encourage people to copy it, you damn well better have the character doing that pose in the film. A truly jaw-dropping and frankly offensive decision that should have led to the five people who spent to see it getting a refund.
Emma Mackey, to her credit, is doing her absolute best. She’s charming, warm, and endlessly optimistic as Ella, selling her as a genuinely decent, hardworking person trying to keep her head above water. In isolation, her performance works. The problem is that the film around her has no idea what it wants Ella to be. Is she a screwball heroine? A political wunderkind? A family mediator? A romantic lead? A tragic figure crushed by responsibility? The script throws all of this at her and resolves none of it, leaving Mackey stranded in a role that never solidifies into a coherent character.
What makes the Simpsons tie-ins especially egregious is the fact Ella McCay herself feels like a painfully earnest, live-action Lisa Simpson who’s somehow survived into adulthood without ever developing self-awareness, irony, or a personality beyond “being right.” She’s hyper-competent, relentlessly sincere, morally flawless, and permanently surrounded by idiots designed solely to make her look smarter, which makes her less a character than a sanctimonious fantasy avatar. Where Lisa works as a satirical counterpoint in a cartoon that actively mocks or challenges her righteousness, Ella exists in a film that worships her every instinct and mistake-free decision. The result is a protagonist who feels engineered in a lab to win applause rather than earn it, a walking liberal virtue signal who drains every scene of tension, comedy, or humanity by never once being allowed to fail in an interesting or honest way.
I barely know what to make of the scattershot mess of a “Plot”. Family drama, marriage strain, daddy issues, brother issues, political scandal, identity crisis, workplace comedy, and vague “importance of decency” messaging are all thrown into the blender with no sense of priority or structure. It plays like a film that went through multiple panicked rewrites or a savage edit that removed the connective tissue holding it together. Scenes begin and end without consequence. Conflicts are introduced and abandoned. Emotional beats are gestured at, then forgotten. By the halfway point, it becomes genuinely difficult to tell what the film thinks it’s about. It feels a series of vaguely connected scenes and is tonally schizophrenic from moment to moment.
It’s not funny enough to work as a comedy, not sharp enough to function as satire, and not sincere or grounded enough to land as a drama. The jokes mostly thud, the heartfelt moments feel unearned, and the political commentary is so toothless it may as well not exist. The film is set in 2008, and that decision becomes increasingly baffling as it unfolds. Its optimistic view of politics, decency, and bipartisan goodwill feels less nostalgic and more delusional, like a relic dug up from a time capsule buried before reality hit hard. In a way it perfectly captures the sort of film you'd see from 2008, for better and worse. It is really sad to see a film like this from James L. Brooks, someone who was partly responsible for the greatest animated comedy ever (The first 10 years or so anyway), and it does not give me much confidence in the recently announced Simpsons Movie sequel.
There are moments that work in isolation. A few scenes have a quirky, neurotic energy that briefly suggests what this could have been. Some family interactions flirt with genuine warmth. Albert Brooks, as ever, is the lone supporting cast member who understands the assignment, grounding his performance with restraint and humanity (Even if he briefly channels the energy from his Drive villain. I was half expecting him to tell Ella “If you don't take this offer, you'll be spending the rest of your life looking over your shoulder”). Unfortunately, everyone else, which includes Woody Harrelson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ayo Edebiri, Rebecca Hall and Jack Lowden is cranked up to eleven, delivering broad, irritating performances that feel like they belong in an entirely different film. It’s exhausting to watch such a talented ensemble collectively misfire of shouting, weeping and eccentric quirkiness.
Ella McCay fails at the most basic level: it’s neither entertaining nor emotionally engaging. It’s an overstuffed, unfocused, smugly optimistic film that fails to live up to its aims. The manufactured hype surrounding it now feels like a mass hallucination, one driven more by marketing desperation than artistic merit. There’s a version of this film that might have worked with a tighter script, a clearer tone, and a willingness to actually say something. This, however, is not that film. A truly baffling experience from beginning to end. It's not an Ella McCay sweep.
'Ella McCay' is out now in cinemas worldwide.
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