Did you know that for some people, Christmas is not the most wonderful time of the year? That in fact, for some people, it’s the least wonderful time of the year? Well, that’s certainly the case for Connie (Kelly Stables), an executive at a luxury parcel delivery service, which is apparently a thing, who is so overworked that she feeds her children plain spaghetti and forgets when she’s meant to be having them and, in general, drives herself so mad with work that it takes the twin interventions of the sickeningly alliteratively-named Christina Christmas, as played by Caylee Cowan, and Rex (Blake Leeper), a Salvation Army Santa with plenty of free time on his hands, to force her to slow down and enjoy Christmas, as these types of characters in these types of films always must. In the meantime, a friend of hers (Sadie Stratton) is dying, her children are growing apart from her, and two Home Alone bungling burglars (Neal McDonough and Brian Thomas Smith) are looking to steal the presents from her home and all the others in the neighbourhood.
Main character Connie is basically the workaholic dad in every 1990s family comedy given a gender-flip; that gender-flip is about the only interesting thing on display here in what is, in essence, a Hallmark TV movie of the week. Digital film, affordable or free downloadable editing suites, online stock music libraries and streaming on demand have meant that the barrier for entry for this type of thing has never been lower, and the result is a proliferation of such titles that most will never see or even hear of. But, clearly, enough people manage to stumble across these films and actually pay to see them (when Disney+ and Netflix and Amazon Prime and all the others let you stream thousands of films a month for around the same price) that they prove to be worth their minimal budgets. Most of them even manage to get a recognisable, if past-it, star in for one day to shoot a couple of minutes of footage all in one room which they can then pepper through the rest of the movie. Here, the unfortunate in question is Sean Astin of Lord of the Rings and more recently Stranger Things, who also works at Connie’s company and occasionally pops his head around her office to door to say a few inessential lines then disappear. Some may also recognisable veteran character actor Neal McDonough, though a glance through his 148 IMDb acting credits suggests that getting him for any project isn’t really that much of a coup.
The other expected tropes are all here: the janky editing, the bad sound mixing that’ll have you turning up the volume just to hear the dialogue, only to be deafened by the music; said music consisting either of only-vaguely-appropriate stock stuff or songs that can only have been included as a favour to friends aspiring to make it in the biz; dialogue that suggests the hand of AI, or else the absence of an English-speaking editor’s hand; cheap-looking sets that are probably the homes and workplaces of friends; cheap sentimentality; and occasional lapses in logic so bizarre you have to wonder how they could ever come out. For example, at one point Connie removes a tablecloth only for the table beneath to resemble a bedframe, with no more solidity than a few wooden slats. How can you use it as a table without the items just falling through? How can a whole film crew of human beings apparently not know what a table is? It’s questions like these, and why you’re not watching Scrooged or Home Alone or Miracle on 34th Street or It’s a Wonderful Life for the first or 101st time instead. There’s nothing here that you can’t see better done there.