My next much-maligned festive film, 2007’s Holiday in Handcuffs is the old ‘hunky stranger poses as boyfriend to help a girl out of a jam, then they wind up falling in love’ plot. Except this one is spiced up by a nervous breakdown and a kidnapping, followed by some scarcely credible Stockholm Syndrome stuff. Again, this one drew a lot of scorn but it’s really no worse than most other cheesy romantic Lifetime/Hallmark efforts. This made-for-TV movie features two dependable former teen idols and, while being dumb as hell, it’s hardly risible.
It’s a supremely silly film that gets away with a lot by coasting on the charms of its leads, Melissa Joan Hart and Mario Lopez. Hart is Trudie, a struggling, slightly manic young woman nearing the end of her twenties and suffering the usual existential crisis such characters get in these types of films. She’s still working as a waitress, hasn’t achieved her dreams of becoming an artist and is stuck with a rich but pompous boyfriend she doesn’t really love. Trudie’s desperation hits breaking point when she gets dumped while at work, right before Christmas. So, suffering a psychotic lapse right there in the restaurant, she pulls a gun on handsome, unassuming diner David (Lopez), forcing him to pose as her lover for the holidays at her family’s secluded cabin.
The whole nervous breakdown thing is played for laughs, which is risky but they get away with it due to Hart’s lovably ditzy performance. Of course, Trudie’s family turn out to be just as kooky , flawed and messed up as she is but David falls in love with them anyway. It’s ridiculously contrived and David doesn’t really try all that hard to escape from this crazy person before becoming smitten. In real life, any sane person would be out of there the second their captor dropped their guard (which she does, a lot), but this is Christmas TV movie land, so David’s soon taking romantic strolls and playing flirty games of chess, rather than knocking her out, grabbing her keys and getting the hell out of there.
We don’t learn much about David other than he’s hot, has a heart of gold and is engaged to a bitch that doesn’t deserve him. Anyone who’s ever seen a film before will know how this one turns out the second Trudie draws the gun. Luckily, Lopez can play this sort of mega-cute sweetheart role in his sleep, so all is well.
I’m struck by how easily this could have been a horror film if they’d casted edgier actors but it’s formulaic as hell, giving the target audience precisely what they want, which is happy smiles and good vibes. Hart and Lopez are magical together and this is a perfectly formed wedge of Christmas cheese. I’m not going to hold that against it. I’ve done a whole month of Hallmark films and can categorically say I’ve seen much, much worse.
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