Welcome to Valentine

6.0 stars.

He calls the little boy a "they"? I think I heard that correctly. So I realized at that moment that whatever else they want you to hear, or think, the agenda is for us all to slowly ease our way into woke. Ok, so I guess I'll talk about the film now. I always rate a film primarily on entertainment value, quality of lead actors, chemistry, dialogue, story, cinematography, the usual. "Welcome to Valentine" has zero chemistry between the leads. I'm sorry, the 15 seconds of a "moment", or the last 30 seconds of the film are insufficient to meet the definition. This story is so overdone and boring. The dramatic part about their careers is so understated, it's practically non-existent. Will he measure up to the man his father wants him to be to run the company? Frankly, I don't care. Will she someday attain her dream of being the true artist that everyone knows she can? Actually, no she won't. Her art is pedestrian and amateurish. I've seen teenagers with a flare for that sort of art doing similar paintings with more skill. Waste of time this movie.

I'm left with any number of questions.

Why did she fall for him? Even going beyond their early antagonism, which is standard for these movies, I didn't see much to justify her liking him much less love.

Why did his dad think he would make a CEO? His personality was not decisive but it was arrogant. Unlike many movies where the rising star performs many feats that prove their competence, there was nothing in George proving competence in anything besides auto mechanics.

What happened to the float?

What next? But I will say as a positive that this movie didn't feel like it was necessary to have absolutely every little thing turn out HEA.

The acting was fair to terrible. Louise Kerr was the worst, badly overplaying Miss Hackey. I have liked Kathryn Davis in a lot of things, but best I can say about her in this is - fair. And there was no chemistry with Markian Tarasiuk. They barely had any one on one screen time.

The story wandered. It was disjointed.

In the commercials, Welcome to Valentine looks like a road trip movie, which morphs into a "let's put on a show" movie. And that's all true. But this movie seems to want to be a lot of different things.

The hero is poised to take over the family business, while the heroine wants her artistic career to begin with the help of an influential gallery owner. Within the first ten minutes, the hero causes the heroine to spill food on that gallery owner. She loses her cater-waiter job and her apartment. (Calgon, take me away!) Oh, if only she had a way to get back to Nebraska. The hero has a car, and we're off.

With all these well-worn tropes, a lot of the plot (and the dialogue) is going to be predictable. Follow your heart. The show must go on.

I liked it. The leads were attractive and they had good chemistry together. Is this the best movie ever? Of course not. But it's cute and sweet and exactly what I expected. I don't think that's a bad thing.

I'm a huge Hallmark movie fan but this movie was too weird and unsatisfying for me. I didn't have a problem with the leads, but their story was uninspiring.

As the movie opens, Olivia is a struggling artist who's been in New York City for two years but is still crashing on her friend's couch (??). She has a job at a catering company with that friend but she's a terrible employee. After being fired (shocker), she finds out that she's losing the couch that she's been crashing on (her friend is suddenly moving and tells her she only has the place for another week).

So she catches a ride home with George, a high flying "40 under 40" golden boy and future Big Company CEO who, bizarrely, is driving an old car 2,800 miles across the country during the winter. Huh? He agrees to drop off Olivia in her hometown of Valentine, Nebraska but his old car breaks down once they get there (shocker). After the town's only mechanic incompetently fried the entire electrical system of his car (by putting the jumper cables on the wrong battery posts), George becomes understandably frustrated and calls the town "Nowhere, Nebraska".

But that town is, in fact, literally located in the middle of nowhere and only has a population of 2,603. I love how Hallmark has become more diverse and inclusive but the real town of Valentine only has one Black person. Just one. And yet virtually everyone featured in the movie (Olivia, her sister Vanessa, Vanessa's son, the restaurant owner, the town's only mechanic, and some random people in the parade) were all people of color. It came across as well intentioned but unrealistic.

When I watched this movie's premiere in February when the movie supposedly takes place, it was literally 24 degrees in Valentine, Nebraska. But some little old lady name Mrs. Hacky spent most of the movie sitting on a little stool outside in the freezing cold, staring at a barn.

Everyone was acting like the annual Valentine's Day parade in this cold tiny town was a huge event. Really?

I hated George's unnecessary lying about Olivia's "success" .

I thought her art was unimpressive.

I thought George's career crisis was poorly set up ("I don't want to spend my time making money for my company, I just want to spend my time giving its money away").

It wasn't as though he had some other clear path or passion that he wanted to follow like Olivia.

Nothing in the movie rang true for me and it was hard to root for anybody in a movie that just didn't make any sense, especially the fantasy ending.

Boy, I hated to give a movie like this a 5 rating. I'm usually a little more generous. This movie tried hard - too hard! At a certain point, it struck me: "WHY is there so much overacting in this movie?" Except for the fairly appealing male lead (Markian Tarasiuk) most of the actresses need to tone it down a great deal. Gestures too big, facial expressions too big, emotions too big... Then I realized several of them have a lot of stage experience, or maybe they've done a lot of emotion-fraught dramas. Whatever. In a big theatre, an actor HAS to be "big" or the audience can't see what's up. These actresses seemed not have have learned how to "bring it down" for the camera. It got to the point that I had to start skipping through the movie.

Also, the writing was just a little too self-conscious, too "New York," too "Neil Simon-esque" to be enjoyable in a small-town romance Hallmark movie. It sounded unnatural. As I said at the beginning, trying too hard - and it just didn't work. Beautiful faces, for sure, but...no.