Lucky Christmas

"Lucky Christmas" has an opening that might tempt some to think this won't be a very good film for the holidays. But once it gets past two grown men, Mike and Joe, drinking beer as they toss Joe's family mementos into a barrel fire, the story takes on some new twists and angles with a single mom her young son.

The lucky aspect of this film is a state lottery in Michigan that each week from Thanksgiving to Christmas will pick a winner for one million dollars. The plot develops around that when the singly mom, Holly, has a winning lottery ticket about two weeks before Christmas. But several things happen that keep her from having her ticket to cash in by midnight on Christmas Eve.

These characters will come together, along with a few more, in an unusual and refreshingly different Christmas movie. The three principals in the cast are all very good. Elizabeth Berkley is Holy, Jason Gray-Stanford is Mike, and Michell Kummen plays Holly's son, Max.

This is a good Christmas film about hard work, trust, kindness and family. Most people should enjoy it.

Well, I use to like the most Christmas movies but this one was a hard one to really like. Actually I found it very stressful to watch. Even the end was stressful and gave me no relief, as these movies use to. I will not be more specific because I don't want to give any spoiler.

It started with bad conditions right away. Several characters were unlikable from the start. They made bad decisions and made you very much question their characters and moral. After that it was hard to feel any positive feelings for them and to really root for anyone.

Their relationship also made several not credible jumps forward that made me surprised. It felt very rushed sometimes. Overall the movie felt unprofessional at several occasions. Other times they acted well and it felt credible.

So with a plot where they wouldn't have made these questionable things and some better direction this movie could have been much much better. It had some potential.

Now this movie is 14 years old and Hallmark seems to have learned. So according to my opinion they now makes much better movies, without such questionable decisions and characters in the leading roles in them.

This has to be the dumbest movie I've seen in a long, long time. The plot follows no legitimate logical. The acting is comparable to an elementary school play. There is absolutely no consistency in the plot. What most films would try to make characters sympathetic, this film makes characters appear as detestable pieces of human garbage. Characters make decisions that are questionable at best and indescribably moronic at worst. The script is ridden with inconsistencies and the most basic dialogue imaginable. It baffles me how anybody can find any entertainment in this film at all, as this isn't even to the point where it's fun to get angry at, it just makes you want to drop an eighty pound dumbbell on your head. The only reason I could find NOT to give it a 1/10 was that it was shot using a camera, and the actors were in frame most of the time. Those of us who were able to make it to the infuriating ending of this sorry excuse for

About ten minutes into this Hallmark Christmas movie, I was thinking that this was going to a variation on Rene Clair's 1931 movie, LE MILLION, in which a poor man in a Paris tenement wins the big lottery -- and loses the ticket. Alas, despite some good acting, particularly from Jason Gray-Stanford, best known for his role as the klutzy police detective in the MONK TV series and good work by Elizabeth Berkley as the chef who could really use the million-dollar lottery ticket, this is a rather straightforward story without much in the way of jokes .... a comedy if not a farce. In addition, the problems that hang over the movie for almost its entire length serve not to make it suspenseful -- will he figure out how to get that ticket back to her without blowing his chances? -- but mildly depressing.

Still, the story is a good one, the actors are very good and if the direction makes me think that the point is the money, rather than the people.... well, maybe it is.

Not one of the best but still well worth watching, I just love the theme in these movies. Yes, I recommend it. James Welch Henderson, Arkansas 12/28/2021.