Hulu
Rating: 🎄🎄🎄
Description: Christina Walker (Lucy Hale) is a successful shop owner who has prioritized her career over her dating life. After another lonely Christmas Eve, she makes a pledge to go on 12 dates in the 12 weeks before Christmas to find “Mr. Right”
Overall Review: I think three trees might be the official rating of the 2026 Christmas movie season. 12 Dates of Christmas is another perfectly respectable entry into an increasingly crowded field of perfectly respectable Christmas movies. It wasn’t bad or great. It was just… fine.
I’m running out of creative ways to say that.
The biggest problem was the slow start. A Christmas movie doesn’t necessarily need to grab my by the collar right at the beginning, but it does need to give me a reason to stick around. This one took its sweet time getting there, and unfortunately, my attention wandered off.
Once I’ve mentally checked out of a movie, it’s surprisingly difficult to check back in. I found myself struggling to stay invested, even as the story began to find its footing. It did find its way later on and even had me tearing up toward the end, but it wasn’t enough to draw it out of the average movie camp.
There’s a difference between a movie that moves you and a movie that consistently engages you. The best Christmas movies do both. 12 Dates of Christmas eventually accomplished the first, but it struggled with the second.
And that’s becoming a familiar story this season. We’re getting a lot of movies that are competently made, reasonably entertaining, and ultimately forgettable. They’re not bad enough to inspire a truly entertaining rant, but they’re not good enough to earn much enthusiasm, either.
It’s a Christmas movie purgatory, and apparently, we’re spending the entire season there.
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