'Countdown to Christmas' movie review: 'A Christmas Love Story'
Broadway sensation Kristin Chenoweth dazzles in this holiday's Hallmark Hall of Fame entry "A Christmas Love Story" (premiering Dec. 7 as part of the Hallmark Channel's Countdown to Christmas).
In short: Youth choir director Katherine (Chenoweth) needs to write a big song for the Christmas Eve show but when Danny, a boy with a golden voice (Kevin Quinn), joins her choir - to the surprise of his widowed father Greg (Scott Wolf).
Chenoweth is absolutely the draw for this Hallmark holiday flick, and her magnetic charm and pluck buoys the movie even when it gets mired from time to time. She is so perfectly cast that it feels like "Love Story" was created specifically for Chenoweth. Katherine radiates warmth, but also a determination that will not be denied.
The odd thing about "Love Story" is how it just kinda stalls out - for almost the entire first half of the movie. The movie pretty quickly establishes that Danny is a natural singer, how great he'd be for the choir, that Katherine is forced to write a new song and Greg is reluctant to let Danny join the choir. That's a lot of moving parts for any movie - which isn't necessarily a problem on its own ... but the "Love Story" doesn't make of a lot of narrative headway in its first half.
It's only the pure charisma of Chenoweth that keeps "Love Story" intriguing through this slow stretch. Oddly, the two most intriguing story arcs involve Katherine's writers block and the father-son relationship between Greg and Danny. The former strings some tension along: because her choir's future depends on whether she can write a song. The latter is secretly the most tantalizing, because it carries an underlying, unspoken conflict between a father's expectations for his son and a son's secret aspirations.
Now, for a movie that juggles a lot of plot threads and only nominally moves any of them forward - "Love Story" makes a super weird choice to introduce yet another, deeply personal, storyline in the final half hour. It's a plot twist that honestly comes out of nowhere. Even if some viewers are totally fine with the surprising twist, it cannot be ignored how the late twist overshadows nearly everything else. All this would be great, if the abrupt change in plot trajectory in the final 30 minutes was justified or set-up in the first hour.
Final verdict: "Love Story" coasts nicely on the inherent charm of its lovely star and the fact that the cast just clicks. The story itself is a bit muddled -- and everything is thrown for a loop after a late-breaking wild plot turn upends the movie (with debatable success).
Score: 3 French hens (out of 5)
"A Christmas Love Story" is rated TV-G and has a running time of 90 minutes. The movie premieres on The Hallmark Channel on Dec. 7.
