Reviews

This is a 2018 TV Movie that smacks of being a 1983 TV Movie. The protagonist, Darcy, is a control freak even by control freak standards, and is worse on Christmas due to some family issues. All she wants is a "Perfect" Christmas.

Oh, and it had better start with waffles! And the just-out-of-reach perfect man from the office. Not her best friend from childhood, who is a bit frumpy. (Why can't the old friend ever be the sexy one?)

And then a mystical shop lady gives her a token that lands her inside her magical perfect Christmas village diorama. Where every day is the "Perfect Christmas". Sounds a bit like Groundhog Day. Except without the interesting personalities, or any character growth. No villains but no heroes either.

Problems with this movie include: 1. Only one character even remotely sympathetic (Brandon The Frump) 2. No characters that grow or change really. Darcy just gets bored or frustrated, but not mature. 3. More of a series of tropes and cliches strung together than a plot. 4. Perhaps five splashes of clever or fun dialog. Mostly between her divorced parents. 5. Bizarrely bad "Irish" accents. They'd be comically bad, if only they weren't so painful. 6. Painfully bad acting by two of the three leads. Which may be a side-effect of having to use an accent they aren't prepared for.

I like Christmas rom-coms, even mediocre ones. This one falls shy of even that low bar.

To be fair, I haven't made it all the way through watching this film. But I generally enjoy character stories and don't usually give up mid-movie.

The movie is basically about a older dead-end bureaucrat, downtrodden, uninteresting, and reserved even for a Brit, who links up with a far younger unfocused female stranger with (he finds out later) strong political passions that run counter to the establishment he is a part of. This -could- have made a good comedy (fish out of water, odd couple, etc.), perhaps a good romance (if the characters were closer in age or at least had SOMETHING in common, or even just chemistry) or a good character study, but in this case (at least through an hour), there is precious little to enjoy about the characters and not much comedy.

The film comes off instead as a propaganda piece, along the lines of "If the world is suffering, people have AIDs and anyone is starving, it's your fault." This certainly isn't escapism. Nor, unfortunately, is it entertainment. Merely celluloid carrying a message.