Rating: 🎄🎄🎄
Premiere Date: October 18, 2024
Description: Jessie (Greening) is desperate to keep her family’s beloved “Chamberlain Family Christmas Olympics” alive, so she does what any rational person would do—lies about having a date. Enter Bryan (Buckley), a guy she meets on a dating app who agrees to spend Christmas with a family of total strangers and immediately gets roped into star-hunting, speed-wrapping, and competitive snowball warfare. Somewhere between the ribbon and the snow, Jessie and Bryan start to feel a real spark—but with the family closing in on their secret, Jessie has to juggle half-truths and holiday chaos to keep her accidental date from becoming a total disaster.
Chemistry: Jessie and Bryan actually had some decent sparks, enough to make me believe this fake date might turn into a real one. Unfortunately, even good chemistry can’t quite elevate the whole film into four-tree territory.
Plot: The setup? Fun. The family games? Weird in the best way. But the conflict? That’s where the snowball hit a wall. Adding an extra person in on the secret amped up the drama without raising the stakes in a believable way. It just made everything feel more frantic, and the quick resolution didn’t really match the tension they’d built.
Design: No complaints here. The set looked festive and convincing—no plastic snow emergencies or last-second garage decorations in sight.
Overall: This one’s solidly “fine.” It’s not a train wreck, but it’s also not going to be the one you revisit every year. Call it the fruitcake of holiday movies: traditional, perfectly acceptable, but not necessarily anyone’s favorite.
Holiday Movie Wrap 