In which Hallmark posits a world where you can go ten years without hearing anything about what your high school boyfriend is doing with his life.
In A Nutshell
Belinda (there is a creative name choice!) is a Hard Working Business Lady. We know she is still nice because she buys her assistant tickets to The Nutcracker. Belinda also tells her assistant that she plants to return to her hometown for the first time in a while for Christmas because her best friend is engaged and Belinda wants to meet the new guy. Belinda’s boss stops in to tell Belinda about a property in her hometown that he’d like her to look at while she’s there for a developer client. If this goes well, she’ll be a junior partner soon! Belinda realizes that the property is the historic old mill, which is currently a museum. The developer wants to turn it into condos.
While driving into town, Belinda somehow runs into Dustin. Dustin is her high school ex-boyfriend who she has not seen in many years. They have some tense banter about mutual breakups and talk about the Christmas scavenger hunt, which is a big thing in town. Even though Belinda and Dustin were chatting in broad daylight, she arrives at her dad’s in the dead of night. Belinda’s dad is TOM ARNOLD, which caused me to do a triple take because Hallmark did not throw him into the advertisements for this movie at all. My husband and I agreed that Tom Arnold actually looks pretty good for his age, all things considered. Tom Arnold is very involved in the Christmas scavenger hunt and says some nice things about Dustin. The next morning Dustin is in their house to fix pipes for some reason.
Belinda goes to the kickoff event for the scavenger hunt to meet up with her best friend and the new fiancé (who continues in the Hallmark tradition of just kind of being there with no purpose other than to fetch things for his lady and occasionally ask silly questions). While there, Belinda somehow ends up entered into the blind draw for scavenger hunt partners, because this town makes you do a scavenger hunt while paired up with a rando. Wouldn’t you know that Tom Arnold ends up drawing Dustin and Belinda’s names out of the hat as partners? I wonder if they will stop bickering long enough to fall in love…
Are There Obstacles To Their Love/Christmas Spirit?
Belinda has a Corporate Boyfriend Who Loves Work And His Italian Tie. They dine in totally empty restaurants together while they talk about all the promotions they are both going to get. He gives her a locket that still have the stock photo in it, which just caused me to type “YIIIIIIIIIIKES” when it happened. He has agreed to go home with Belinda for Christmas, but then he has a last minute meeting and has to take a later flight, allowing Belinda to reconnect with Dustin during the scavenger hunt. I did feel kind of bad for Corporate Boyfriend when he flew all that way only to find his girlfriend close talking with her high school ex in the car.
The main obstacle to their love was the fact that Dustin and Belinda were supposed to go to college together but he decided not to leave their small town at the last minute. Now, these people are weeeell out of college (I think at some point they referenced that all of this happened ten years ago, which made me chuckle a little bit because the actors are most def in their mid 30s, but OK). Regardless of what timeline we are using here, it has been years since Dustin decided not to go away with Belinda. This movie would like us to believe that even though he stayed in his small town along with eeeeeevery other person Belinda knows (including her father), not one single person ever figured out that Dustin’s dad was out of a job and so Dustin had to go to work, and that’s why he didn’t go with Belinda? I will tell you, I am very far out of high school and I graduated in a class of 580, and I’m pretty sure I could figure out what just about any person I graduated with is doing right now between a combination of searches on Facebook and asking my mom if she’s talked to any of her friends about their kids lately. In a small town people would have talked, it would have gotten back to Belinda’s dad or her best friend, and someone would have told her the truth. Her best friend acted like this was shocking new information when Belinda told her, which is insane. For goodness sake, Dustin is doing light handyman work for Belinda’s father!!! He definitely would have let her know at some point in the last ten years!!!! So yeah, I’m calling shenanigans on this alleged obstacle, because this is not how small town gossip works.
The other conflict is that Dustin works for the mill museum but he doesn’t know that Belinda’s job is to help the developer turn the mill into condos. Which is going to happen pretty quickly, because the mill is way behind on its mortgage payments. Belinda is very worried about revealing this fact to Dustin, but Tom Arnold reassures her that Dustin will understand that it’s just business and that she would save the mill if she could. Of course, there is about 20 seconds of tension when she reveals this fact, but then Dustin is like “Oh, that’s cool, I know it’s not your fault!” I guess I shouldn’t be really be mad about this quick resolution, because the movie is depicting normal human adult communications instead of the usual “I can’t believe she would do that, I better not ask her to explain herself or the situation at all and just storm off instead” move. The town decides to raise money for the mill museum through the scavenger hunt, but Belinda knows it won’t be enough to get the mill out of debt.
Also, Belinda has a lot of melodramatic pronouncements about Dustin dating her high school long jump rival. I would like to watch a movie about that high school long jump rivalry please, Hallmark. Or maybe a movie about Tom Arnold and Jenny from the diner who he is apparently dating, because judging by Belinda’s face when she figures out her dad is dating again there are a loooooot of issues we need to unpack about that.
But Do They Find The Meaning Of Christmas?
Unsurprisingly, I missed the part of the movie where they explain the actual rules of the scavenger hunt. From what I can piece together, people are supposed to take and submit photos of themselves doing the Christmas activity that is revealed in the clue. So instead of having to bring back a snow globe, you just take a selfie with the snow globe and send that in to the judges. I can totally get how this would be fun, and I wish they would have taken the time to write some more interesting questions and prompts. The riddles were painful, but it did get us to all of our favorite Christmastime tropes — snowman! Cookies! Gingerbread houses! Christmas karaoke!
One of the prompts is to do a kind deed for someone, and so Dustin and Belinda go to see this older gentleman who…yeah, I totally missed the set up for this and who this man is and why Belinda knows him. Sorry about that, guys. What you really need to know is that he was very grateful that Belinda invited him to Christmas dinner and thinks that Dustin and Belinda make a very cute couple.
OH I ALMOST FORGOT: there is a little kid who Dustin knows for some reason who talks about his mother being across the ocean at army (my husband called from the other room “IS MOTHER AWAY AT ARMY WINNING TROPHIES FOR MARKSMANSHIP?” in his best Buster Bluth voice when he overheard this part). Somehow Dustin makes like two phone calls and the next thing you know that mother is back giving that awkward little kid a big Christmas hug. He basically explains this as “I know a guy and called in a favor,” but I think this would have been a pretty tight turnaround to get her back from a foreign country…but it’s ok, because Christmas magic!
But Do They Fall In Love At The End?!?!?
Well, Corporate Boyfriend arrives and is cramping their style, but Belinda just awkwardly makes cookies with both of them. Belinda and Dustin lose the scavenger hunt to Belinda’s best friend and her fiancé, which I would tell you more about but I have no earthly idea how this thing was scored. But the true prize is that they raised $15,000 for the mill somehow through this scavenger hunt that did not actually seem to involve fundraising of any kind. Corporate Boyfriend was not happy to learn that the whole scavenger hunt was raising money for the mill. Doesn’t Belinda even care about her promotion? Don’t worry though, he makes a graceful exit when Belinda tells him they want different things out of life.
Sidebar: has anyone else noticed how amicable all the breakups have been in Hallmark movies lately? This is the second or third movie I’ve watched so far this year where the boyfriend who is being thrown over for another guy just respectfully said “You know, I get that we want different things.” Didn’t Corporate Boyfriends used to be bigger jerks in these movies who would just like drive off in their sports cars while yelling? Wasn’t there more conflict and a more satisfying feeling of kicking the d-bag to the curb? I’m thinking of the guy who doesn’t shake hands and the guy whose mom was on a macrobiotic diet…I don’t think they were really super dramatic breakups, but you came away with this really satisfying feeling of “Thank goodness the heroine ditched THAT dude, he was the worst!” I feel like a conscious decision has been made to not make the existing Corporate Boyfriends the worst anymore so that there is very real little conflict in the movie. I can only hope that somewhere a sociology student is writing her thesis on the evolution of Hallmark movies and how they are representative of escapism in this day and age where our everyday lives are riddled with conflict.
OK, back to this movie — the old man of undetermined origins steps up on stage and says that Belinda and Dustin were so kind to him and reminded him of the true meaning of Christmas, so he is going to donate all the money needed to save the mill from the developers. Surprise! He was rich this whole time! I strongly encourage someone to vet this donor. The mill is saved, Corporate Boyfriend is out of the picture…time for Belinda to go to Dustin’s house on Christmas and deliver a teary monologue about how she has always loved him. Boom! Back in love!
I was obsessed with the fact that the actor playing Dustin looks like Mikey Day from Saturday Night Live. My husband adamantly disagreed and says he looks like Matt Bomer, which I personally do not see at all. Feel free to vote in the comments. I thought these two were fine together. Dustin was giving me a slightly creepy vibe because he was reaaaaaaaaaally calling back to a lot of their high school history like he has maybe built a small shrine to Belinda in his room that he’s been worshiping at for the last ten years. Or maybe he’s just a super nice earnest small town guy reconnecting with the love of his life. Could go either way, really.
Should I Watch This Movie?
The trailer made this movie look absolutely terrible. They picked the worst possible line deliveries from both actors to put in the commercials (“Wow, we seem to be uncovering a lot on this scavenger hunt” made me cringe so hard I almost hurt my face). I started off this movie thinking that the actress playing Belinda was not good at all, but she won me over with some sassy line readings. So overall, better than expected, but not good enough to get me to pay attention to approximately 30 percent of the major plot points.
Deck the Hall(mark Movie)s 