Hallmark
Rating: 🎄🎄🎄🎄
Description: Meg (Acker) set aside her newscaster aspirations after a disastrous audition experience in college and has been happy as a news producer in her small town of Fern, Texas. Billy Kane (Macfarlane), her former college crush and audition partner, is a well-known celebrity host in Hollywood on the brink of losing his career after an on-camera gaffe. At the advice of his publicist, Billy begrudgingly returns to Texas to lay low and spend the holidays with his sister (Canning) and her family. When Meg and Billy cross paths he’s happy to see her but her feelings are on the frostier side – she’s still upset he took advantage of her failed audition to get the gig himself. Meg finds herself seeing Billy more than she’d like since his nephew Graham (Isaiah Haegert) is in the horse therapy program her dad runs at their ranch. With their annual Reindeer Roundup holiday event coming up Meg’s dad gets sidelined after an injury. Her dad enlists Billy to serve as its host, much to Meg’s chagrin. With the Reindeer Roundup just days away, Meg teaches Billy basic riding and roping skills to get him ready for his hosting duties. In the process, they slowly reconnect and Meg sees there’s more to him than Hollywood glitz. As their connection grows, each of them helps give the other the courage to step outside their comfort zones and find new joy – and possibly love – in unexpected ways. Starring Amy Acker and Luke Macfarlane.
Overall Review: Well, I did not see that coming.
For the first hour and a half of My Christmas Cowboy, I was fully prepared to give this movie two trees. Possibly one. I had already started composing a review about terrible snow, questionable southern accents, and a version of Texas that seemed to have been created by someone whose entire knowledge of the state came from watching old episodes of Dallas. And then, somehow, this movie made me cry.
But let’s start with the problems, because there were still plenty.
First, the snow was terrible. Absolutely terrible. But honestly, I was willing to overlook that because the movie was supposed to take place in Texas, where the presence of any snow at Christmas was already asking me to suspend a fair amount of disbelief. They could have skipped the snow altogether. The rest of the Texas atmosphere, however, was another matter entirely.
Everything about the setting felt like a caricature. The cowboy culture was dialed up to eleven, and I lost count of the number of men walking around with their jeans tucked into their boots.
Unironically.
Gentlemen, what are we doing?
And then there were the accents. The “y’alls” sounded like they were being delivered by northerners who had watched a few YouTube tutorials on how to speak Texan. Every time someone opened their mouth, I expected them to follow up with “howdy, partner” and tip an imaginary ten-gallon hat. Oh wait. The hats weren’t imaginary.
It was all just a little too fake. The setting, the accents, the cowboy stereotypes… None of it was doing this movie any favors, and I was becoming increasingly convinced that Hallmark had produced another forgettable Christmas romance. And then we hit roughly the ninety-minute mark. Suddenly, the movie introduced its central conflict in a way that completely changed my experience of the story.
I won’t spoil what happens, because I genuinely think it’s worth experiencing without knowing what’s coming. But what impressed me wasn’t simply the unexpected turn. It was how thoughtfully the filmmakers handled it. It had real emotional weight and somewhere in the middle of it, I found myself wiping away a tear.
A TEAR.
From the same movie where I’d been counting the number of men committing crimes against denim and cowboy boots. That’s quite a turnaround. What makes My Christmas Cowboy so interesting is that its strongest moments arrived after I’d nearly given up on it. The movie spent an awfully long time convincing me it wasn’t very good, then delivered a moving story that made me reconsider everything.
I still think the Texas stereotypes were ridiculous. The accents were still bad. None of that magically improved. But the payoff was so well written and so well executed that I couldn’t ignore it. This movie spent ninety minutes earning two trees and somehow rode into the sunset with four.
Y’all, I did not expect that.
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