Falling For Christmas ( Netflix - 2022) I'm as happy as everyone else at the resurrection of Lindsay Lohan from the depths of notoriety and mockery......
While she might never ascend to A-List glory, her starring role in this Netflix Christmas movie is a Mt. Everest sized leap from her previous projects.....mostly consisting of unwatchable, direct-to-the-WalMart-bargain-bin movies and that woeful MTV thing where she managed a Mykonos beach club....
And leave it to Netflix to make sure her comeback in a holiday rom-com is so especially Christmas-y, it makes the Hallmark movies look like 'Nomadland'......
There's tons of snow.....there's a sleigh.....there's a Christmas tree lighting......there's a hunky widower and his indescribably cute little daughter......there's amnesia.....character redemption......and Lindsay Lohan! What more could you want?
It's futile and a waste of time to apply critical standards to a TV Christmas romance......this genre and all its accumulated tropes are as carved in stone as the Ten Commandments.....like opening a box of gingerbread cookies and reviewing each one individually........
"Falling " starts out by somewhat cribbing from 1987's "Overboard". Lohan's a pampered heiress coping with a babbling bisexual boyfriend, a preening doofus who lives only for more clicks on his Instagram and Twitter feeds. His mountaintop marriage proposal goes awry when Lohan tumbles off the peak......and then subsequently rescued by....you know it.....Hunky Widower with indescribably cute little daughter.
Waking up with amnesia in Hunky's struggling little bed-and-breakfast lodge, Lohan's still a fundamentally warm-hearted, sympathetic soul, but clearly incapable of everyday tasks like making a bed and doing laundry. But that's nothing to worry about, since Christmas Movie Commandments dictate she'll bond with Indescribably Cute Little Daughter and slowly but surely fall for HunkyWidower.
And anyone who frets about whether Hunk Dad will keep the lodge out of bankruptcy.....you folks need to see more Christmas movies.....
Lindsay Lohan truly shines as the MVP here, because let's face it, the female leads in Christmas movies rarely posses any amount of natural movie star charisma. Since all of us as a collective audience already know she's been though more ups and downs than Olympic skiers, we can't help rooting for a happy-ever-after for her.
Does she get one? Hmmmmm........ It's a Christmas movie. What do you think?
There's no middle ground with holiday romcoms. You either love, adore and embrace them or you run screaming in disgust if you even see 10 seconds of the trailer. For the first group, 4 stars (****) For the Screaming In Disgust contingent.......a rating's redundant for this, right?
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