The '4' is for the scenery, which is lush, and for Erin Karpluk, who turned in her usual competent performance despite the lame dialogue, and for the cute little girl and her dog.
The title is a cheap attempt to cash in on the season. This movie has little to do with Christmas except for the obligatory family-togetherness lesson. For family togetherness to work as a plot device, there has to be a smidge of conflict beforehand. But in this movie everyone was so nice, so bland, that their 'apartness' could have been cured with an invitation to dinner or a night of board games in any month before Thanksgiving and the 'project' brought them all together anyway.
As someone else mentioned, there was utterly no chemistry between the romantic leads. Even though both Erin and Michael Shanks are competent actors, it's hard to see why they would take roles that offered so little scope for their emotional range either as individuals, romantic partners, or family members. Everybody in this film suffered from botox of the emotions. Believing in God doesn't and shouldn't equal living your whole life in emotional neutral. If you can't know pain, you can't appreciate joy.
Frankly, it wasn't the religious expressions that turned me off as much as the blatant unreality of the basic setup. Even Christian business people can't simply walk away from 3 months worth of scheduled work to satisfy their ailing grandfather without suffering consequences to their business's reputation for years to come. That kind of blatant guilt trip ought to be unthinkable for an ethical elder of the family. And any grant-funding organization that steered a huge part of their budget to the family business of an employee's dad would be in serious hot water with everyone from their private donors to the IRA.
I had to wonder, too, what message the writers/director thought they were sending, because it came across to me like 'If you're a Christian and pray a lot, you can convince total strangers to allocate millions of dollars to give your family's company money to rebuild an old lodge just because your ailing grandfather once had happy memories there.' Silly me; I thought Christianity meant more than using God like a cash machine. Especially at Christmas.
The title is a cheap attempt to cash in on the season. This movie has little to do with Christmas except for the obligatory family-togetherness lesson. For family togetherness to work as a plot device, there has to be a smidge of conflict beforehand. But in this movie everyone was so nice, so bland, that their 'apartness' could have been cured with an invitation to dinner or a night of board games in any month before Thanksgiving and the 'project' brought them all together anyway.
As someone else mentioned, there was utterly no chemistry between the romantic leads. Even though both Erin and Michael Shanks are competent actors, it's hard to see why they would take roles that offered so little scope for their emotional range either as individuals, romantic partners, or family members. Everybody in this film suffered from botox of the emotions. Believing in God doesn't and shouldn't equal living your whole life in emotional neutral. If you can't know pain, you can't appreciate joy.
Frankly, it wasn't the religious expressions that turned me off as much as the blatant unreality of the basic setup. Even Christian business people can't simply walk away from 3 months worth of scheduled work to satisfy their ailing grandfather without suffering consequences to their business's reputation for years to come. That kind of blatant guilt trip ought to be unthinkable for an ethical elder of the family. And any grant-funding organization that steered a huge part of their budget to the family business of an employee's dad would be in serious hot water with everyone from their private donors to the IRA.
I had to wonder, too, what message the writers/director thought they were sending, because it came across to me like 'If you're a Christian and pray a lot, you can convince total strangers to allocate millions of dollars to give your family's company money to rebuild an old lodge just because your ailing grandfather once had happy memories there.' Silly me; I thought Christianity meant more than using God like a cash machine. Especially at Christmas.