Holiday Crashers

This was a disappointment. I really like the lead actors, but the story....lie after lie after lie. These women aren't teenagers! They are full grown and still playing games like children! How could anyone take them seriously? Not to mention beginning relationships with a lie? Never a good beginning to a lasting, healthy relationship no matter what the romantic comedies try to tell us. And because of the deception and childishness of the characters, they are not as endearing as they could have been. I just didn't enjoy this story. The sets were gorgeous; all the actors beautiful....the story was just lame and dumb and some parts downright silly.

Two best friends, Toni (Lyndsy Fonseca) and Bri (DanielkanMonet) try to add some excitement to their mundane lives by crashing exclusive Holiday parties and assuming false identities. They each meet a guy they are attracted to but things go bad when Justin (Chris McNally) thinks Toni is a lawyer and enlists her help on a potential business deal, but the truth is she had a panic attack and never completed law school. The situation becomes more complicated because Justin's recent breakup involved a lying girlfriend and one thing he hates are liars! There's also a hidden deception with Bri and her flame Vinny (Jag Bal). The lead actors have great chemistry. The movie is entertaining and a bit unique, although it has the usual Hallmark "conflict" as part of the plot. My complaint, as with all Hallmark movies, is that they need to tighten the middle of the script and allow more time for the script to focus on the story conclusion which always feels hurried and rushed and squeezed in to the final 10 minutes. In this movie we want more of the relationship between Toni and Justin instead of the proverbial "a year later" and a lot happened in that time. BUT a nice movie overall.

Two best friends from childhood start crashing holiday parties with stolen invitations from their 2-bit print job, in the process they continually make up personas...including the most ridiculous jobs. One of the two is just a drifter and the other is a law school graduate who had a panic attack when she tried to take the bar exam. Eventually the two get caught up in their lies when Toni, who is believed to be an Ivy League lawyer, gets roped into consulting on a job for Justin to cover for a former law graduate when she goes into labor.

Lots of coincidences in this film...like that Toni and Justin meet at several parties, like Justin's employee being one of Toni's classmates, like Bri meeting and hitting it off with a rich billionaire, like To i's dad being involved in a court case with the same car company that Justin is thinking of acquiring. I think their were a few too many coincidences, but it did make for an entertaining story. The one big downside was the glorification of lying. It was like watching bad people do bad things, which was just sad.

I really like Chris McNally, who played Justin and this performance was no exception (although...I am not sure I liked the long-ish hair). Overall it's an entertaining holiday hallmark film, but I wish it had more of a cautionary tale about lying, this seems more to be a road map of how to lie your way to success and romance.

Best friends Toni (Fonseca) and Bri (Monet) have worked at the same card shop for more years than they should as both struggle to find their true life's path. This holiday season, Toni and Bri decide to shake up their humdrum world by creating new identities to crash the amazing Christmas parties from the shop's confidential invitations. All harmless fun. Until Toni gets mistaken for a lawyer, which isn't too far off the mark since she did finish law school...just never completed the bar exam. Toni and Bri are then whisked away to a fancy corporate Christmas retreat in the snowy Vermont mountains by handsome business mogul, Justin (McNally), whose crush on Toni is real even if her legal career isn't. And Bri is along for the ride as she has eyes for Vinny (Bal), a valet who may have a secret of his own. Can a distraction help Bri find what path in life she's supposed to follow? Will Toni end up with the guy of her dreams or in a blizzard of trouble? This fun Christmas crashing romp will either end in disaster or two happily-ever-afters.

There's really not much to say. It's the same old formula as all romances are made of, but there's very little chatting between the romantic parties and very little examination of the emotions of everyone. Fonseca and Monet have fabulous chemistry on screen, but no-one else really has. It's not a nasty film at all, it's just very banal. You would not get this out to watch at christmas just because it's christmas.

I gave it a 5 because it's not nasty, but it's not great either.

Another dumb script ruined a Hallmark movie. Is it an impossible task to find a decent script? There should be plenty of writers between the US and Canada still recovering from the writers strike. Seems like the place to start are Hallmark movies that were popular and got favorable reviews, find those writers. Hallmark had a reputation for having very high quality rom-coms, but they're not what they used to be.

A lot of the cast are regulars, Canadian actors and actresses who are in a lot of Canadian rom-coms, they are filmed in Canada but set in the US. Good to see Chris McNally. I assume this was filmed in the greater Vancouver area and the locations are beautiful.