Emma Caufield, four years after Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, has a lead in her own romance comedy and holds her own even in light of a promising but flaw script that has her portraying a well-known local radio talk-show host on love along with Barbara Niven, an established, experienced character actress, as her former mentor and now ghost in a romantic version of A Christmas Carol. The problem with this movie is its efforts to follow the Christmas Carol tradition in both a dramatic and comedic fashion with a script that even incorporates a sloppy version at times of Samantha's Bewitched (1964-1972) behavior from the television series along with poor magical over-the-top special effects as well as introducing two former beaus in the script as past lives with high hopes for a better movie but collapse into underdeveloped subplots with a simplistic, clumsy ending. At the beginning, the character that Caufield plays is too harsh and cold, not having the Devil Wears Prada (2006) finesse of Meryl Streep that it needed. There are moments when this movie rises above the mundane rom coms with several of its tender moments and suggestions of more complex relational scenarios and twists. The final scene with the holy light was a nice touch, but the ending scenes only manage to overly simplify a tossed together conclusion that the movie's evolving and potentially promising plot did not deserve.
