A tale of Two Christmases sounds interesting until it's not. We follow scatter brained female lead Emma (Katherine Barrell defaulting to girl-next-door but trying her best to be corporate) as she encounters two different, parallel, and perplexing Christmas timelines that converge on a significant plot hole that will leave you even more baffled and confused. None of it makes any sense and it's like the director didn't even watch the completed film, had they done so they would realize they need to fire the editor. This mess was completely avoidable had they run the alternate Christmas experiences in linear order, completing one before moving on to the next, and then fixing the ending to eliminate the plot hole.
Emma doesn't know what she wants - the classic Hallmark Christmas in a quaint Vermont town with the sweet Drew who is BFF's with her parents and never left home (an overacting Chander Massey) or the edgy 'big city' Chicago experience with the classy well-funded workaholic Max (a wooden Evan Roderick). Usually these are separate movies for Hallmark, but this time they tried to put them both into a single film - a novel idea that I really like. The execution however is a horrendous, epic fail. If you've ever seen Back to the Future you know that time travel and alternate realities create plot holes that must be nominally addressed or it all quickly devolves into nonsense. Well, they didn't address anything here. It's head scratching how the timelines diverge at the beginning and we are dazed and confused from then on. The movie keeps switching from timeline to timeline but doesn't do a good enough job juxtaposing them against each other so you think you are watching one timeline when you are actually watching the other. You the viewer spend more time trying to sort this all out than paying attention to what is going on with the characters.
We can blame this whole mess on Santa. He shows up and gives the magical eye wink but doesn't deliver the goods in terms of explaining what he actually did. Were the alternate timelines dreams as implied by the ending? Or does Emma have to permanently live with her actions during those two alternate realities as implied by the plot hole? It's not clear to us and I don't think it was clear to the script writer either.
Essentially Drew was one way and Max the other. Drew was a dream, Max was real, except, plot hole. The only viable solution to this that I can think of is that Max was confused and showed up at the airport a day early for his ski trip, totally forgetting he was supposed to be in the office on Christmas Eve and throwing a party at his apartment that night while Emma somehow knows about his ski trip from some unseen conversation between the two. On the other hand Max seems to fully accept Emma dumping him at the airport meaning he remembers the night before when she threw a tantrum after dropping a yule log and insisted on leaving the party early. Otherwise her entire speech to him at the airport would utterly confound him because he barely knows her since the Christmas Eve they spent together never happened... In the end I have to say it is quite possible her phone just had a glitch and showed December 24 instead of the correct December 25, and then, well, all is well.
Outside of the parallel universe stuff, we have standard Hallmark fare here. There is a meandering dull plot, really bad dubbing, the last five minutes are the most interesting of it all, a 'don't wear high heels' cliche, an unnecessary co-worker who doubles as a personal friend, a stereotypical 30 something Millennial meltdown that requires parental emotional support, and of course "Vermont" looks like Colorado.
The film does deviate from Hallmark standard in a few ways beside the parallel plot lines though, like Emma is refreshingly normal looking with a normal body shape, she doesn't look like the overdressed barbie dolls we see in way too many other Hallmark movies. Maybe it's just me but Emma's mom kinda looks like she had some plastic surgery done which is at odds with usual Hallmark parents. Then we have the total lack of any kind of weirdo out of place side character, I guess the co-worker is supposed to fill this role but her lines are totally irrelevant to the plot and she is mostly an afterthought.
All in all A Tale of Two Christmases is filled with a messy plot, actors who appear to be acting for the first time, and some odd choices in content. Had they watched the awful editing in Flags of Our Fathers and realized parallel timelines are always a bad idea and made everything linear here, they might have had a home run instead of a total strike out.
Emma doesn't know what she wants - the classic Hallmark Christmas in a quaint Vermont town with the sweet Drew who is BFF's with her parents and never left home (an overacting Chander Massey) or the edgy 'big city' Chicago experience with the classy well-funded workaholic Max (a wooden Evan Roderick). Usually these are separate movies for Hallmark, but this time they tried to put them both into a single film - a novel idea that I really like. The execution however is a horrendous, epic fail. If you've ever seen Back to the Future you know that time travel and alternate realities create plot holes that must be nominally addressed or it all quickly devolves into nonsense. Well, they didn't address anything here. It's head scratching how the timelines diverge at the beginning and we are dazed and confused from then on. The movie keeps switching from timeline to timeline but doesn't do a good enough job juxtaposing them against each other so you think you are watching one timeline when you are actually watching the other. You the viewer spend more time trying to sort this all out than paying attention to what is going on with the characters.
We can blame this whole mess on Santa. He shows up and gives the magical eye wink but doesn't deliver the goods in terms of explaining what he actually did. Were the alternate timelines dreams as implied by the ending? Or does Emma have to permanently live with her actions during those two alternate realities as implied by the plot hole? It's not clear to us and I don't think it was clear to the script writer either.
Essentially Drew was one way and Max the other. Drew was a dream, Max was real, except, plot hole. The only viable solution to this that I can think of is that Max was confused and showed up at the airport a day early for his ski trip, totally forgetting he was supposed to be in the office on Christmas Eve and throwing a party at his apartment that night while Emma somehow knows about his ski trip from some unseen conversation between the two. On the other hand Max seems to fully accept Emma dumping him at the airport meaning he remembers the night before when she threw a tantrum after dropping a yule log and insisted on leaving the party early. Otherwise her entire speech to him at the airport would utterly confound him because he barely knows her since the Christmas Eve they spent together never happened... In the end I have to say it is quite possible her phone just had a glitch and showed December 24 instead of the correct December 25, and then, well, all is well.
Outside of the parallel universe stuff, we have standard Hallmark fare here. There is a meandering dull plot, really bad dubbing, the last five minutes are the most interesting of it all, a 'don't wear high heels' cliche, an unnecessary co-worker who doubles as a personal friend, a stereotypical 30 something Millennial meltdown that requires parental emotional support, and of course "Vermont" looks like Colorado.
The film does deviate from Hallmark standard in a few ways beside the parallel plot lines though, like Emma is refreshingly normal looking with a normal body shape, she doesn't look like the overdressed barbie dolls we see in way too many other Hallmark movies. Maybe it's just me but Emma's mom kinda looks like she had some plastic surgery done which is at odds with usual Hallmark parents. Then we have the total lack of any kind of weirdo out of place side character, I guess the co-worker is supposed to fill this role but her lines are totally irrelevant to the plot and she is mostly an afterthought.
All in all A Tale of Two Christmases is filled with a messy plot, actors who appear to be acting for the first time, and some odd choices in content. Had they watched the awful editing in Flags of Our Fathers and realized parallel timelines are always a bad idea and made everything linear here, they might have had a home run instead of a total strike out.