The Finnish Line

6.2 stars.

For the cool scenery and wonderful icy Finland and all that good stuff, this movie is nothing special for me. A good Hallmark film must evoke a sense of whimsy, romance, or endearment, but this sparks only a bit of each.

The dog sledding and racing aspects are interesting, but they are such a minor part of the movie that they are basically inconsequential until the very end. And there is a bit of suspense, but it doesn't redeem the story.

The script focuses mainly on the relationship of the two leads, but it's professional with an utter lack of heart or excitement. The only remaining possibility would be humor, which is completely absent.

I don't see the point of 'The Finnish Line'.

One of the things that stood out to me in the story was Monty. I really hated him about as much as any Christmas rom/com villain ever. He went out of his way to pick on Anya including dirty tricks on the trail. But isn't it so typical of this kind of story that towards the end he has all kinds of excuses that make him the victim?

The race was a little confusing, but I think I figured it out. Anya talked about being so far behind she had too much time to make up that she would never win. Then when the final leg came, the way the movie showed the start and finish, it obscured that fact. I believe the explanation to how the finish could look close is because the start would have been staggered according to amount of time to make up, but it wasn't shown that way. Monty started first, but it looked like Anya left only shortly after that.

Then there is the climatic drama along the final leg. I'm not even sure what I think about that.

The trouble with rom/coms that center around contests, races, sporting events, etc is that the rom part of the movie gets diminished. I really didn't think Beau Mirchoff and Kim Matula had enough screen time to show much chemistry or explain why Anya and Cole fell in love. I loved Kim Matula last year in the Ghosts of Christmas Always, but I didn't care much for the way Anya got down on herself. Not sure how much that was writing or acting. Probably both.

The viewer gets to see a Finnish town that boasts as the home of Santa Claus and some local culture with it.

I don't know why this movie got such a good review rating. While I like the story I just can not believe that they shot this movie in such a beautiful country and blurred out all the landscape scenery. Are you kidding me? Why why would you do that? Do you need lessons in photography? Those scenery shots should have been shot at F-5.6 to F-13 and not at the F-stop your camera person done them in it makes many of the scenes look terrible. Now it looks like any suburb in any country even the not so nice states in the USA. That said I think the acting was great and also the story it's one of those animal stories that warms the heart and makes you happy on a gloomy day. I wish there were many more like it.

This one breaks all the molds, and is more an adventure movie than a Christmas romance. Set in Finland, the movie follows a sled dog race as our heroine tries to win one of the few races her father lost in his lifetime.

Standing in her way is the same man whose dirty trick cost her father the race at the moment he should have taken the lead.

There really wasn't anything about this writing--either plot or dialog--that bothered me as ill thought. Our female lead comes across as someone with depth, conflicted by her motives to reclaim her father's only loss versus her desire to show her own success.

We very much enjoyed this film.

I actually had to make an account just to make this review because I can't believe what I even just watched.

No Finnish actors hired for this, no one knew how to speak or pronounce Finnish, some of the cultural facts were just blatantly incorrect and some of the town names even were spelled wrong. I don't think anyone Finnish was actually involved in writing or fact checking this mess. You know none of the Finnish characters even had Finnish names? At one point they butchered the grammar of something so bad that it sounded pretty lewd to an actual Finnish ear, which at least was hilarious even tho surprising.

I mean it's a Hallmark movie so what are we expecting but I think the minimum requirement when using another country and culture as a setting is to honor that and not use it as a butchered trope that you probably only asked chatgpt about. If you made a movie that was set in Japan would you hire Russians to pretend to be Japanese while speaking butchered Japanese off paper while your American white girl adventures there?

It's a shame because I don't think the acting for the leads was bad and the story was almost cute. I was so excited to see a foreign movie about Finland too. The girl best friend character is very cute and supportive, and of course the dogs were completely adorable and the relationship building and chemistry was fine. But I could not in good conscience recommend this to anyone who actually cares, talk about cultural appropriation.