The Christmas Sitters

The idea of two unrelated people filling in for mom and dad before Christmas is not unique, but it isn't the most common. This one especially elicits memories of Life As We Know It from 2010. It follows predictable lines with many of the usual Christmas traditions thrown in. The mechanism for the conflict came up rather suddenly. From there on, the viewer might have predicted what was coming, but it would have been like a coin toss at times. I thought that part was well written.

Tristin Mays, as Nora, starts out as the uptight planner and rule follower. Nathan Owens, as Max, is the irresponsible uncle. They have decent chemistry. Watching them spar while they develop a relationship is good.

This is a decent ION Christmas movie. It centers around Nora (played by Tristin Mays), an associate attorney who recently moved to the same city as her college BFF (played by Melissa Ordway). Amid unpacking, her BFF calls from Europe to ask her for a favor: to babysit the kids as they (the parents) are facing flight delays on their return trip home. To Nora's surprise, the parents have also asked the father's brother Max (our other protagonist in this story, played by Nathan Owens) to babysit the children. The two must work together, which is challenging at first, but soon things start to change between the Christmas sitters. The story is fun and cute. That said, parts of the script are rather weak, especially the scenes where a conflict between Nora and Max emerges (e.g., the scene after Nora returns home from picking up work documents from the office). The dialogue/lines in these scenes are, at times, unimpressive, not very convincing. From about 35 minutes in, I started to engage with the story and characters more; i.e., the movie started to pull me in. The acting, overall, was pretty good, I thought. Mays had a solid performance, though it took me about 20 minutes to warm up to her. She had some nice scenes with the kids and Max, especially during the second half of the film. Owens also had a solid performance. What worked on screen for me was their chemistry; it was quite good, I felt. They both too had some lovely scenes with the children from Christmas caroling to some afternoon skiing. Indeed, there was a lot of Christmas spirit and festive cheer in the second half of the film. There was also some good music selection and editing to boot. All in all, it is a pretty good Christmas movie; one the whole family can enjoy.

Not the most engaging movie. A little bland. I don't feel the ages of the children are believable either.

The Christmas Sitters (2020) -

The kids were brats, Nora, played by Tristin Mays, was a complete caricature of a useless, childless lawyer and Nathan Owens as Max, was the stereotypical man-child, so although he was quite nice to look at, his character was a knob and I couldn't have given two flying figs if the pair of them got together, killed each other or taught the children a valuable lesson about the spirit of the season, because they all just annoyed me too much.

On another day I might have given it longer to try and impress me or change my mind about it, but with a Skybox full of Christmas films that will probably keep me going until Easter, I wanted to try and focus on the ones that I will be more likely to enjoy, with a possibility that I might revisit these slightly questionable ones at another time.

Unscored as Unfinished.

If you have recorded the Hallmark movies for this Christmas season you can delete this one before you even try to watch it. It is SAD that some at Hallmark have chosen to create and air storylines and movies alternative to real family entertainment. It is SHAMEFUL that they are trying to pass this off as worthy of our viewing time.

We wish others had saved us from starting this movie. The kids didn't see it, thank goodness. Many of our family and friends began passing the word around and were saved the embarrassment and shock at such an awful attempt at a story.

Thank goodness we now have the Great American Family channel and decent family entertainment.