A Nanny for Christmas

A movie where the protagonist creates an unnecessary problem for herself.

The movie was ok...it's a romance Christmas movie so I didn't expect much . The one thing that bothered me throughout the film was the main character's eyebrows! They were horrible and over tweezed! Her whole look was so horrible....no makeup and shabby dried straw like hair... she just didn't look the part she was portraying. Very distracting. The acting was average and Dean Cain was overacting for sure.

I love all the silly, "you can see the happy ending after the first 3 minutes" Christmas movies. I love them. I watch a ton every year. But this one just doesn't know what it wants to be and fails miserably trying. This movie has at least 4 (maybe 5) typical Christmas movie plots going at once, and doesn't have enough time to develop motivation of characters or resolutions for any them. Even for a Christmas movie people act in extremely contrived ways. You can't figure out why they would do that. And you don't really like them enough to care. Back stories are hinted at but not developed. It seemed the author had no idea how to set up the situation so just randomly got people to move to starting places for the story. Then there is too much plot to resolve, so abracadabra a small event or two suddenly makes everyone make decisions to tie up a happy ending for all the plots elements. Motivations for change are completely inadequate. If they had picked one or two of the several problems in the characters lives and focused on motivations and resolutions for that, it could have been a good movie. But it wasn't.

Dean Cain plays VERY against type in this movie, as a bombastic company owner. When Ally Leeds, an advertising exec, pitches a campaign including an element certain to anger him, he storms out of the room and fires her ad agency, leading to her dismissal.

Later, thinking she's interviewing for a job at another agency as an ad exec, the owner of that agency thinks she's applying as a nanny and gives her that job. A bit desperate for ANY income, she accepts.

He unorthodox nanny techniques are fun, but complication arise when she falls for an ad exec at that company and pretends to also work there as an ad exec.

This is a fun movie, not at the top of our list, but one we're just fine with seeing again from time to time. It helps that we love Dean Cain, even though his role here is minor and, as I wrote, against type.

Suffice it to say that I had, of course, never heard about the 2010 movie "A Nanny for Christmas" prior to sitting down to watch it here in 2024. I stumbled upon the movie as I was gathering Christmas movies for my December Christmas movie marathon.

Writers Michael Ciminera, Richard Gnolfo, Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan put together a rather generic script. I just didn't get that particular warm and sappy Christmassy feel as I sat through the 87 minutes that the movie ran for. Sure, it was a watchable movie, but it just didn't really stand out in the vast selection of sappy Christmas movies that are out there.

The movie does have a couple of familiar faces on the cast list, with the likes of Emmanuelle Vaugier, Dean Cain, Richard Ruccolo, Cynthia Gibb and Clyde Kusatsu. The acting performances in the movie were certainly fair.

While I did manage to sit through the entire movie, I was not particularly entertained. And since the movie failed to capture that sappy Christmas spirit, then the movie just didn't cut it for me.

This is definitely not a movie that I will be returning to watch a second time. Nor is it bound to become a Christmas classic. But I am sure that there is a fan base out there for a movie such as this.

My rating of director Michael Feifer's 2010 movie "A Nanny for Christmas" lands on a four out of ten stars.