A Royal Christmas Crush

1. If you are going to have a romance featuring a prince, get someone who can actually speak with a consistent accent or just don't bother. Stephen Huszar is a good actor and certainly didn't deserve this.

2. Come up with a new approach. Recycling the same old plot is sad. The interfering Brigitta who tries to besmirch the prince's love interest is just downright stupid! Credit us with more intelligence. Birgitta should have been fired and/or tossed in jail.

3. Does anyone who is staying in an Ice Hotel really get romantic? It is literally FREEZING! They are wearing coats and gloves throughout, yet they go get in a hot tub, which will result in them freezing when they get out. That scene seemed gratuitous so we could view Stephen Huzsar's chest. But Ava wears a jacket in the hot tub.

4. At the Royal Ball, the costumes were awful. What's with the woman in the tight yellow sausage dress?? Can't afford to hire anyone else?

DO Better, Hallmark!!!

If you've seen one royal Christmas story ... That's not totally true, but this movie has most of the usual plot threads. There is an iron maiden who dislikes everyone. There is a rival for the prince's hand. Happens to be the daughter who happens to be the iron maiden's (or iron matron's) daughter. There is a skeptical set of royal parents. There is the prince's assistant who like most such characters has been with the family for years and cherishes him like his own son. The thing that threatens the romance between the leads, which I usually call the conflict, was a bit unusual but had the usual result. The ending is mostly predictable but too much over the top in a few ways. The fact that the plot is unrealistic never stops writers of rom/coms especially royal ones. This one goes farther than most.

As you might guess from what I've said so far, I didn't think the story had much in the way of highs or lows. The dialogue was flat. Some of the scenery, including the ice "castle" was interesting. I didn't see much chemistry between Katie Cassidy and Stephen Huszar, but that might have been because Cassidy struck me as too stiff in general.

'A Royal Christmas Crush' Not the best example of a Hallmark Royal movie. For every 'One Royal Holiday' there is one of these: a run of the mill movie redoing tired old tropes with zero imagination.

Quality over quantity is, I think, a phrase Hallmark needs to abide by more often. Just because you can show 40-odd Christmas movies in October-December and a few more for Christmas in July, doesn't mean you should.

'A Royal Christmas Crush' suffers from poor accents (why does every one of these countries, purported to be somewhere in Europe, seem to speak with a British accent?) and very stereotypical characters, and the key fact that the leads - Katie Cassidy and Stephen Huszar - do not have the necessary chemistry. I must admit that the ice castle setting was cool, but, again, it seems every twelfth Hallmark movie these days is set in one - so the originality is starting to wane.

I don't know why the writers of this movie just had to have her career interest in building "sustainable housing communities ". The whole point of watching Hallmark movies, especially one with a romance with a royal prince or princess is to get away from reality for a couple of hours. I don't want to hear about, listen to dialog about topics, like climate, or the environment that's are already covered 24/7 on the news channels.

Next, it was pretty obvious that they essentially used the same filming location and concept (an ice hotel) as they did for the Hallmark movie Winter Castle. Even the lead female characters had essentially the same color hair.

I am so sick of all this royalty nonsense. And before you start screaming Megan and Princess Diana, Princess Di's family were aristocrats. Her father and brother were Earls and her grandfather was the 7th Earl Spencer. Megan was in the "commoner" category, according to royalty experts. And by the way, if you're going to do a royal story line you could at least observe royal protocols. You don't touch a royal without permission but in Hallmark you sure do.

The saccharin sweet drivel Hallmark is pumping is getting more and more ridiculous. It's been rehashed so often it's become a sad little trope that has elevated redundancy to a whole new level. Just stop.

It's like the writers just said, "Hey, you know we could keep this royal story line as a template. Just change the location of the fictional kingdom, the names of the two love interests and voila! We're done.

I KNOW they have other creative ideas because I watched The Christmas Quest and The Finnish Line this year which were very good. And previously they offered My Southern Family Christmas, Christmas at Notting Hill, A Heidelberg Holiday and My Norwegian Holiday all of which were delightful . I love the ones where you expand the characters and we learn the customs and rituals of where they are from. Three Wise Men and a Baby and its sequel were excellent.

Come on, writers, wake up that gray matter and give us more than the obligatory flour fight in the kitchen, the Christmas tree lighting in the town square (with all 18 persons of the town), the misunderstanding (which occurs always in the last 15 minutes) and the reconciliation, which always happens so the movie can end Hallmark happy and everyone is smiling.