How distant and far gone seem the days when Hallmark produced those three charming movies with Peter Falk playing the role of "Max", the angel! And the levity with which Rachel Boston interpreted an angel in "Christmas in Angel Falls! By 2025 standards, Heaven works like a business corporation with awards for the best employee, petty rivalries and threats to demotions. And it owns a branch that meddles in human love relationships, a match-making industry where angels act like competing agents with a social influencer mentality who are willing to resent and battle the rivals. Here we have a story in which two competing angels, supposedly hundred of years wise, yet with the psychology of poorly developed teenagers, ineptly interfere with two young people, who eventually found each other independently of their meddling. All in order to justify the plot of falling in love with one another, themselves. The side story of the two young would-be-lovers in not even half baked. Despite family, friends, and even angels trying to push them together, they simply show a sparkle of reciprocal attraction in the end, with no explanation of any basis or reason why they should love each other. The basis of the budding love affair between the angels is even more obscure: Ory and Ayres display no chemistry whatsoever, beyond the absurdity of the between-angels relation. What's more, Benjamin Aires appears too aged for the part. It should be time to consider grandfather roles, rather than acting as a young beau. And what with the unshaven beard? He looks more devilish than angelic. If the idea is to make him look more masculine, he does not need that, and he only looks uncouth. The action is confused and some characters seem irrelevant or redundant. E.g., Mirabelle, played by the likeable Amanda Jordan, serves no real purpose but the one of filling time. Without her character the movie would be exctly the same.
The story has few moments which could be sweet, but they mostly feel cliché, superficial, and phony. It could have made some sense if set in the environment of a match-making company. It is totally out of place when Heaven, Christmas, and angels are thrown in. Why involve traditions and creeds rich in faith, spirituality, deep moral values, when the script, the concept, and the writers seem to understand none of them? Spiritual mirth is substituted with farce, intimate joy exchanged for silly acting or shake-the-booty dancing, selflessness end empathy yield to self-serving, clueless pettiness. If I were a Christian I would find this production highly offensive. I am not one, yet I do object to downgrade, or degrade, the values of centuries of traditions and beliefs of people who understand them or practice them. This way we reduce the highest ideals and human values to base mundane woke feasts. Lifetime Channel already ran this course and is phasing out of the Christmas movies business: is Hallmark striving to follow suit?
