Warning: Spoiler Alert (Just Kidding – the script is so predictable there’s literally nothing spoilable)
My wife is a huge fan of cheesy Christmas movies..for reasons that continue to elude me a decade into our relationship.
As per our usual holiday agreement, I agreed to watch at least one Christmas movie with her not named Christmas Vacation, Die Hard or Lethal Weapon.
This year, my wife heard that the cheesiest of the cheesy ones to watch is Netflix’s A Christmas Prince. We are about 30 minutes into this Christmas Crap-tastrophy and I can’t take much more.
A quick Google search and I found out the Buzzfeed thinks “A Christmas Prince is simultaneously the best and worst thing Netflix has ever produced.” So far I am thinking the latter of the two is more accurate than the first.
A Christmas Prince is an amalgam of every cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie I have been forced to endure over the past ten years wrapped up in one predictable, horribly acted package. It does star Rose McIver who I really enjoyed as the uber pale Liv Moore on CW’s IZombie.
The film starts off with the tons of stock footage of Christmas in New York City such as ice skating in front of the tree in Rockefeller Center and Christmas lights all round various New York City landmarks. The film then cuts straight to what I am pretty sure is the Chicago Tribune building (?) where we meet our heroine: Amber.
Amber is a struggling newspaper journalist (which is actually the most believable part of the story) and is complaining to her under-developed co-worker characters (the stock gay friend and the sassy female black friend) about her mean boss and 5 rejection letters. Wouldn’t rejection letters be received over email by media professionals nowadays?
But Amber gets the opportunity of a lifetime when her publisher sends her to the fictional country of Aldovia, which I guess we are supposed to assume lies somewhere between Maldovia and Albania, to break a tabloid story about the playboy prince who soon will become king.
Amber has no trouble assuming the identity of the handicapped 12-year-old princess’s tutor and sneaking into the least secured and poorly guarded royal palace in all of Europe. Here we meet the rest of the ensemble cast of retreaded Christmas characters.
Enter all the stereo typical characters that we are familiar with seeing annually on Hallmark Channel. The Prince is of course a loyal, honest, charitable man who is misunderstood by the press. The conniving 2nd-in-line to the throne cousin who desires nothing more than to one day become king. The prince’s title obsessed ex-girlfriend who happens to lock lips with the prince while Amber catches a timely misunderstood glimpse of the embrace.
His mother, Queen Helena (Alice Krige), is a cold queen with ice in her veins (until she warms up to our heroine). She is also the one cast member I recognized from her portrayal as the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact.
The 63-year-old queen is also the mother of the 12-year-old princess, which apparently makes her birth a Christmas miracle?
And remember Amber’s 5 rejection letters? As Twitter user Emily Black Favreau noted in a screenshot of Amber’s computer from the movie, Amber may have been rejected simply because she is a horrible journalist:
“Have to find out!!” and “I have to dig deeper” are not exactly bullet points a reporter needs in her notes. And why does the bottom of her screen say “0 words”? I see around 50 on her screen? What crap version of Microsoft Word is she using anyway?
Sometime between Amber befriending the Tiny Tim-esque Princess Emily and me waking up from my nap induced by the whimsical musical score, the cousin’s dastardly evil plot to assume the throne had been exposed by our heroine and the kingdom of Aldovia, the prince’s throne and Christmas are all saved.
Basically, the only reason to subject yourself to this Abu Ghaib level torture of a film would be if you are in the doghouse with your spouse or you need to bank some brownie points because you have done something that will soon land you in that doghouse.
Side Note: Also, how come the weather in all these Christmas movies calls for overcoats and scarves but no gloves? Exactly what temperature is that?
In the end, I would rate this around a 1.5 on the Geeky Daddy Movie Review Scale and a Kid Friendly on the Geeky Daddy Sidekick Safe Scale.
Geeky Daddy 
Bwhahaha…. of course, a Hallmark movie is playing in the background as I read this…
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Hey Geeky Daddy, our wives are business friends. I totally feel your pain as my wife demands we watch at least three of these Hallmarks a week now. We have signed up for all the Hallmark apps so all the movies are right at her fingertips. Just remember this… This too, will pass ( Until it’s Christmas in July time). Take care.
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