Hallmark
Rating: 🎄🎄🎄
Description: Audrey Bell (Newbrough) is a globe-trotting pop-up restaurateur who returns home for Thanksgiving to the news that her late grandfather’s beloved bowling alley, Wonderlanes, will be sold. Audrey agrees to stay for one last festive season at Wonderlanes and decides to revive its iconic Winter Wonderlanes youth bowling tournament. To drum up publicity for the event, she reluctantly teams up with Jason Miller (Lo Presti), a local news reporter and her high school boyfriend. Working side by side the embers of their past start flickering, rekindling feelings they thought they left behind. As the tournament draws near, Audrey questions her next move that will take her away from the people and places she loves…and decide if she’s ready to walk away from Wonderlanes – or finally put down roots where her heart truly belongs. Starring Ashley Newbrough and Franco Lo Presti.
Overall Review: Winter Wonderlanes was milquetoast boring. And the only reason it earned three trees instead of two is that I watched it live and couldn’t fast-forward through it. Apparently, being held hostage by the broadcast schedule helps a low rating get a little boost.
Our two leads had chemistry, technically. It wasn’t the kind that had you wringing your hands hoping they’d end up together. It was more like neither of them had anything better going on. It was less meant to be and more might as well.
Meanwhile, the movie somehow found room for two additional romances, both of which went from zero to sixty in the final ten minutes. One came so completely out of nowhere that I wondered whether I’d missed an entire subplot. The other took a perfectly serviceable slow burn and left it on simmer with no noticeable progress to be had before the end of the movie.
My favorite almost-moment involved our heroine standing at the Christmas tree farm with what appeared to be a piece of pine tree stuck to her scarf. Rather than our leading man using the opportunity to get close and remove the errant pine, it disappeared in the next shot. Not romance, just a continuity error. Frankly, the pine needle was the star of that scene.
And finally let’s talk about the bowling alley. I understand that Christmas movies are running out of quaint little businesses to save, but a bowling alley? I could smell the disinfectant spray through my television. Nothing says holiday romance quite like sweaty rented shoes and the aroma of industrial-strength sanitizer.
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