Director: Justin G. Dyck
Writer: Patrick McBrearty
Starring: Emily Alatalo, Andrew Bushell, Franco Lo Presti, and Genelle Williams
It’s the holiday season, which
means it’s about time to decorate the tree, listen to festive music, drink hot
chocolate, and of course, cuddle up in front of the television to watch some
horrible Christmas movies! Which one would get the honors of kicking off the
2020 season for us? It was a rather lengthy process, but we decided to skip the
more popular recent releases to find one that sounded so absolutely awful that
it had a greater chance of dampening our Christmas spirit, rather than heightening
it.
And that one we settled on was Christmas Catch, about a
rather inept female police detective nicknamed Mack (short for McKenzie), who is literally ordered
by the FBI to date a man suspected of stealing a valuable jewel (when was this
story written, the 1920’s?) Considering she’s desperate for Mr. Right (we’re
talking “desperate” to a level almost unmatched by any other Christmas movie
character in history), she revels at the chance—but then starts to question her
motives when she genuinely falls for him. Much of the common holiday romance
hijinx ensue in a story that should be mostly familiar to anyone who’s ever
seen one.
But Christmas Catch does have a couple tricks up its
yuletide sleeve, including a twist that I admit caught me totally off guard,
and that briefly takes the material into Lifetime mystery territory. It’s also
notable for allowing two main characters of the opposite sex to just be
friends: in this case it’s Mack and her partner Reid, an attractive, straight
male whom she is forced to live with while they stake out the suspected diamond
bandit. Not once are there ever romantic overtures from either, which is both unexpected and refreshing.
The performances are pretty good overall: Emily Alatalo has
acting chops to match her looks, and dominates the picture as Mack, the
bumbling detective-turned-dater. While much of her performance is standard fare,
she does have a couple of emotional breakdowns toward the end that are
startlingly realistic; so much so that
they almost feel out of place in an otherwise silly, lighthearted romp. Yanic
Truesdale, who many may remember as Michel Gerard, the hotel owner from a
little show called “Gilmore Girls”, also deserves some praise, delivering a
noteworthy performance within a limited amount of screentime.
It’s not all snowshowers and rainbows, though: Captain
Bennett, who is Mack’s boss, also happens to be her mother. She is one of those
insufferable mother characters so pervasive in these movies; so nosey in her
daughter’s life that it becomes creepy. The movie also milks jokes about Mack’s
hapless dating life well beyond the point of normalcy; it doesn’t ever come off
as cruel (mainly because she’s a good sport about the ribbing), but it’s a
pretty redundant topic for the first half-hour that thankfully dies down once
the story gets rolling. And Genelle Williams (as FBI Special Agent Robertson)
is completely miscast, failing to deliver the grit and confidence that her
character requires.
However, Christmas Catch actually defies those odds to become an above-average example of the genre: it’s charming enough to overcome most of its faults, tweaks the predictability formula enough to include some genuine surprises, and actually features some genuinely funny moments. It takes longer to get going than it should, but once it does, it’s a solid example of the "holiday cheese" subgenre.
RATING: 6/10
TRAILER
SIDE NOTE OF PERTINENT INTEREST TO ME: The director of this, who's filmography reads like he's the son of the president of Hallmark, has completely broken mold, crafting a horror movie titled Anything for Jackson, about a Satanist couple who try to bring back their dead son...with horrifying consequences. Just tossing that out there, in case there are fellow lovers (or avid haters) of cheesy romance movies that also happen to love the horror genre.
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