Rating: On the 0-Christmas scale this gets “What just happened????”
IMDB rated it 6.6/10
The kids were in bed on time for once and me and the wife settled down to our first Christmas movie of the season. We opened the Hallmark Movies Now app on the old ROKU and clicked the first thing we saw. Dang, I hate being wrong.
This little lump of coal was 1 hour and 23 minutes that is impossible for me to get back. Add the 10 minutes for this review and that is some serious loss of productivity. The saving grace is that is was time with my wife, full of laughter, puzzlement, and a perplexed wonder at who the heck Debbie Macomber was and why did she think this was a good idea for a movie?
Serious, the move is made for TV and Not Rated, which could have been translated to Not Watchable.
The movie stars Meghan Ory, who since the movie went on to star as Abby O’Brien in the ever delighted family TV saga, Chesapeake Shores. We love this series and thought it would be interesting to see Meghan play a role besides the uptight, business savvy single mom. I’ll be honest. She wasn’t the problem in this flick, although her fake laugh makes us laugh because it is so bad. She was quirky and charming albeit with split personalities, morphing from a serious get-what-I-want person into a ditzy full grown woman with the IQ of a dumbbell.
The plot starts out before Christmas, where Ory’s character, Ashley Jane Harrison is forced to “plan B” when her flight is cancelled. She rents a car with perfect stranger, Dash Sutherland (played by Andrew W. Walker), who happens to be an undercover FBI agent. Convenient, since Ashley has been targeting by said FBI as an international asset undertaking a Christmas espionage.
If that’s not enough, the FBI field office is involved tracking the pair, a different agent is dispatched to tail Ashley and her driving FBI agent companion. Trouble occurs along the way as a pair of devious street youths throw a wrinkle into the plan, which has the effectiveness of not being relevant at all and wasting 15 minutes of film time. I’m positive these misguided youths are the directors nephews or something, because it really didn’t need to happen…But, hey, neither did this film.
The plot contained so many unnecessary elements. How it was rated 6.6/10 is beyond me. I’m guessing it is only because of an involved puppy, which is yet another ridiculous addition that makes no sense.
How does this end up? Like the Bourne series, I was on the edge of my seat, only to be let down by an ending as preposterous as the rest of the film.
Conveniently, in 2020 there was a seeming remake called Dashing Home for Christmas that I plan to check out later this year.
