Christmas in Toyland

It was great to see Jesse Hutch back on Hallmark-and with Vanessa Lengies (loved her on NBC's American Dreams series). They had a great chemistry together and the movie was very heartwarming and Christmas-y. Hallmark ended Christmas in July on a high note with this movie.

If you've watched as many of this kind of movie as I have, so many things are familiar. This story has a lot of those plot lines, but there are tiny surprises here and there in how they are delivered.

You also get to know the most prolific actors. Jesse Hutch I know and he's not my favorite, but I can't knock him too much either. Vanessa Lengies - I didn't realize how well I knew her. She hasn't impressed me in the past.

So it was a surprise to me how much I got into this movie. Vanessa Lengies played a Charlie that I was really rooting for. Her chemistry with Hutch was quite good. I wanted to watch them together endlessly. There were a lot of good lines that helped and the actors' timing was good. Usually a kid like Emma adds a great touch, but in this case they didn't take advantage of that angle as much as they could have.

Another review commented on how fast lines were delivered too quickly and I noticed that once or twice.

Something happens at the end of the party at 1 hour 36 minutes (commercial runtime) which makes absolutely no sense, but then it was necessary for the story to progress the way it did.

Loved the premise. Loved me some Jesse.

But: Many of the actors spoke too quickly, inaudible to more "senior" ears--and even the close captioning could not keep up (with typos to boot!).

Jesse Hutch and Vanessa Lengies worked well together they had good chemistry the movie was basically a remake of another movie I've seen on another Network but it was family-oriented and cute Vanessa's voice got a little annoying I just watched it because I love Jesse Hutch.

As others have noted, some of the speech in this film is REALLY fast. There were lines neither my wife nor I could understand even by replaying them.

It made me wonder if they ran long, and rather than cutting a scene, they time compressed all or part of it. I've never heard so much rapid speech, and from multiple roles.

Back to the movie. It's a common trope. Large corporation decides to cut brick and mortars, and it's up to our intrepid data analyst to save the day by discovering why one particular store still shows a profit.

The writers have a few ideas for that. I'm not so sure those things work in real life rather than scriptwriter idea-land, but they make for a charming story either way.

It's a recommended watch but I doubt we'll subject ourselves to the machine gun dialogue again.