I’m not too sure why 2005 TV movie Chasing Christmas was so derided. Sure, it’s cheap looking and alarm bells do start to blare when Tom Arnold is your marquee name but I still find it to be one of the most original Christmas movies I’ve seen so far. Sure, it’s yet another spin on the ‘Christmas Carol’ thing, but it’s packed with novel ideas and the performances across the board are pretty above average for this sort of low-budget fare. The filmmakers clearly understand that we’ve all seen the Scrooge formula done a million times so, after an overly familiar first act, the rug is yanked out from under us.
Arnold is crabby old Jack Cameron, your standard Ebeneezer-ish penny-pinching company boss who hates the holidays because that’s when he caught his wife cheating on him right in the middle of their daughter’s nativity play. Ouch. So, Jack refuses to decorate the house, won’t give presents and - best of all - goes postal in the supermarket trying to find a can of Coke that doesn’t have Santa on it.
Meanwhile, the “Bureau of Christmas Affairs” have chosen Jack for this year’s haunting treatment from three ghosts. Trouble is, having done this for hundreds of years, the Ghost of Christmas Past (Leslie Jordan) has become jaded. After one too many of Jack’s sarcastic putdowns, ‘Past’ has a meltdown and buggers off, leaving Jack stranded in the past. All of a sudden, we’re in Back to the Future mode, with Jack attempting to re-do his formative years in the hopes his wife won’t leave this time.
The Bureau send ‘Present’ (Andrea Roth) back to sort out this mess and avoid everyone losing their jobs. The film takes some mischievous turns, including an intriguing ‘will they, won’t they?’ flirtation between Jack and the cute, bubbly ‘Present’. There’s also some funny stuff about ‘Past’ decrying Dickens as “a two bit hack” who only wrote his famous yuletide tome after the ghosts had to visit him in the first place.
Elsewhere, there’s some delicious awkwardness as Jack has to listen to his past self consummating his marriage from under a pool table and a few fun nods to Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story, involving the popularity of B.B. guns as Christmas gifts back in the day.
This one is nothing spectacular but, considering I go in with low expectations, I find it amusing and refreshing. Though Jack laments the failure of his marriage, his time-hopping experience teaches him to count his blessings and focus on the good things that did happen.
It’s a little disappointing then that this one suffers from poor production values that can’t match the quality of the writing. Some sets look part-finished, with offices looking half empty and with threadbare decorations thrown up almost as an afterthought. The special effects are also on the cheap CGI side, though none of this prevents Chasing Christmas from being a pleasant festive surprise.
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