Never Been Chris'd

Best friends and successful business partners, Liz (Pascal Lamothe-Kipnes) and Naomi (Janel Parrish), return to their hometown for the holidays, where they run into former high school crush, Chris (Tyler Hynes). Back in the day, they were not on his radar, but now they actually get to know him, and they find him charming. He initiates spending more time together, which fans the flames of ardor, possibly leading to conflict between the two best friends.

While the women deal with old feelings from high school and feel friction from their mothers, they reassess their own relationship.

The strong point of this film is the believable relationship between its two female stars. This is a buddy film of sorts, so thankfully their chemistry is strong. In addition, both of them are excellent actresses with the ability to handle both comedy and drama.

Tyler Hynes is a Hallmark stalwart. Here he gives his usually-dependable performance, though the film focuses more on the females.

This is not a typical Hallmark Christmas movie. It is, however, funny. The characters are immature and self centered without the more normal over the top "proof" of immaturity, shallowness and self absorption. They are presented in a "stupid" manner, which is not a failure of the script writing, but it is deliberate. It is comical as it was intended to be. There is no heart warming lesson (or a tying together of the story lines), no typified misunderstanding that gets rectified nor an engagement ring on Christmas Eve. It's comical as we both laugh at the characters and empathize with them. I enjoyed its edge of humor.

This was so boring that I could barely pay attention. I don't know why Tyler Hines was even in it, except maybe to get us to watch it. His role seemed forced and didn't really fit.

Because it was basically about these two girls that I never really cared about at all. Not their friendship, not their history, and not their present.

And once again, what they showed us this movie was going to be about, never really materialized. Just like a movie with Alison Sweeney, about a card, which was about other characters that I also never cared about. It's the classic bait and switch.

So, I could barely give this movie a three. Even two seems too much.

It's a boring snooze that I will not watch again.

This was THE worst movie ever. First premise was stupid and male lead was terrible actor. Every review talks about how great an actor Tyler Hynes is but he totally phoned it in. So wooden, was actually cringeworthy. And what's with the vegan storyline. That just didn't seem to be applicable. Did AI write this? I'm sorry. There's no way that the brainiac girl suddenly wants to hang with the popular kids that ignored her 17 years earlier. She's better than that. This friendship didn't make sense. I kept expecting it to be some odd prank played in the successful girls. And again the vegan story line while he's sneaking fish. Who does that!!!!!

I'm sorry, but this felt as if it had been written by a group 16 year olds who couldn't agree on which direction the plot should take. Normally I'd rate anything with Tyler Hynes in it a 9 or 10, but this just was not a fitting vehicle for his talent. His part could have been played by anyone. What a waste of talent. The movie itself was slow, rambling and muddled and not worth the watch for me - though I did watch till the end hoping there'd be some redeeming quality, some epiphany or...something. The characters were lukewarm at best and unlikeable at the worst - not enough interest in any of them to care what happened. Guess I expect Hallmark to raise the bar for Christmas but not this time.