This is actually the third part in a three movie series. And as anyone who has watched movie trilogies before understands, the last movie is always the worst. The Father Christmas series continues the long time Hollywood Tradition of milking a popular story for every last dime with Marrying Father Christmas. This movie continues the saga of Miranda (Erin Krakow) and Ian (Niall Matter) as they take that final plunge into matrimony. Unlike most Christmas movies on Hallmark, there is no romance that evolves over the course of the film since well, they are already engaged and about to get married. This means the writers had to add some other elements of conflict to create a workable story.
Ian and Miranda have decided to get married on Christmas Day because lord knows there isn’t enough sh*t going on during Christmas Day that adding a wedding to attend doesn’t enhance. Rather than insert any conflict within their relationship the writers decided to make all the conflict external. To those ends we have the three main challenges that our characters have to deal with. Conflict 1: It seems that Miranda’s stepmother Margaret (Wendie Malick) has decided to invite additional acquaintances of Miranda’s late father to the wedding ceremony creating an issue with space and seating (Good Lord, whatever will we do!!!!). She then wants to move the wedding from Miranda and Ian’s cottage to the main house. I’ve never understood the desire to have a wedding in your home where strangers can just roan all over your house. This wealthy family of a famous deceased actor can’t afford a church or other venue? How many bathrooms does this cottage have? Will they be bringing in Porta-Johns to handle all the people? Thankfully, after much avoidance on the subject, Miranda finally tells Margaret they want to have it at the cottage. Yes, it was as spine tingling of a narrative as it sounds.
Conflict 2: One of the family’s friends, Thomas (Barry Flatman), arrives and Margaret fawns all over him like a lonely sorority girl desperate to find a boyfriend before the upcoming formal. The two hit it off but then Margaret gets cold feet and decides to end things. Luckily it all gets resolved when her son tells her how happy she has looked the last few days with Thomas. The morale of the story is that even really domineering old people need to get laid every once in a while. I’m glad that all worked out before I fell asleep on account of being so friggin bored.
Conflict 3: This was the only decent conflict and the main one of the show. A man shows up in Boston and meets Miranda about work. She then sees him in . . . whatever the hell town they live in. There might have been something about him making a donation, I can’t recall. What’s important is that he says he is Charlie (Bill Dow) the uncle she never knew. She doesn’t believe him and sends him off. Later she gets a package with a bunch of photos of his mom from back in high school. She finds out he did make a donation to her father’s charity. Now she wants to track him down and in doing so finds out he is a pastor in California. She leaves a message for him at his church because . . . apparently he doesn’t have a cell phone. It’s not like a pastor might need to be contacted at any time where he would need something like that right? Maybe for Christmas Miranda can get him a pager.
Then one day Miranda spots him sitting on a bench in town (Weird huh?). So he got Miranda’s message and he tells her the story. Turns out that he was a young pastor when his sister told him about the guy she was seeing. When Charlie found out that the fellow actor was still married, he cast his sister aside and ignored her for 30+ years. Charlie only found out he had a niece from a story on the internet. Even when he mellowed, he never reconnected with his sister because they had lost touch and he didn’t know where she was. I guess Charlie knows how to use the internet only enough to find out about Miranda but not enough to do a “people search” for his sister. I mean, hey . . . the guy doesn’t have a cell phone. Maybe his understanding of the internet at the Church computer is limited to playing online solitaire and searching for online porn. He just got lucky when he saw the article on Miranda (Sure, let’s just go with that for now.).
He apologizes for being such a douche to his sister (Hell, maybe he can make a sermon out of it) and Miranda forgives and embraces their new relationship. She invites him over for Christmas but he insists she should spend it with the ones she is close to and he can catch up with her another time (But obviously not by cell phone because those are the devil’s work!). This did seem a bit odd but hey, I guess the guy has either been hiding out in town after he was told to leave or he’s been flying back and forth from California to Vermont at least twice so far. I don’t know, maybe he’s one of those fraudulent televangelists who has in own jet plane so it’s really no big deal. Once this happens the movie climax’s with the ceremony which is really just an excuse to show a montage from the two previous (and far more entertaining) movies.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like both Krakow and Matter (they are the main reason I sat through this dreck) but even Pitt and Jolie couldn’t save this material. This dead horse has already been beaten enough. I give it a 1 out of 5.
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