UPTv
Rating: 🎄
Description: Returning home to save her family’s chocolate shop, a woman finds love and learns that the richest legacies are made from the heart.
Overall Review: I’m not entirely sure what’s keeping the ornaments on this one tree rating to keep it from joining the undecorated trees int eh basement of my rating system. Maybe I’m just feeling generous. ‘Tis the season and all that.
This movie was a mess.
Let’s start with the plot, or at least what I was eventually able to piece together of it. I’ve watched enough Christmas movies to know that we’re not always dealing with the most sophisticated storytelling, but I do generally expect the filmmakers to introduce their characters and explain how they know each other.
Apparently, that was too much to ask.
The movie took its sweet time revealing basic relationships between characters. Who knows whom? How are this Australian and American woman connected? Why are they acting like they’ve known each other forever? At one point, I was still trying to figure out how two women were sisters.
SISTERS.
That’s not a shocking third-act revelation. That’s information you establish before the audience starts wondering whether they’ve skipped twenty minutes of the movie. And then there’s our leading man.
His acting was so stilted and wooden that I wondered whether he’d been carved from one of the Christmas trees on set. Every line felt unnatural, every interaction was awkward, and somehow he delivered much of it with an enormous, doofy smile plastered across his face.
Not a charming smile. Not a romantic smile. But the kind of smile that makes you wonder whether the Christmas movie is about to take a very unexpected turn into a true-crime documentary.
I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice person, but his character occasionally looked less like a romantic lead and more like someone the neighbors would describe as “always so friendly” during an interview after the police discovered something horrifying.
And when the acting is that distracting, it becomes nearly impossible to care about the romance. I was too busy trying to understand the family tree and wondering why the leading man looked so delighted by absolutely everything.
There are bad Christmas movies that are entertaining because they’re bad. There are movies that are boring but at least coherent. And then there are movies like Chocolate for Christmas, which somehow manage to be confusing, awkward, and painfully unconvincing all at once.
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