A VERY MERRY MIX-UP
An engaged woman spends the holiday with a warm and caring family whose son catches her eye.
Alicia Witt owns and operates a small antiques shop in Brooklyn that her late father founded many a year ago. Business is pretty far from booming, as the lack of regular customers is barely keeping the doors open. Or maybe she's just not terribly good at running a small business, because she keeps buying expensive pieces for the shop, then falls in love with them and decides to keep them rather than offer them up for sale.
You know that's the dumbest thing you can do if you're trying to earn a profit, but she's just so sentimental she can't let anything go, including her latest acquisition: a 19th Century replica of an 18th Century German clock that may or may not have magic powers.
I think her character's name is Alice, or Alison, or maybe Alexis. I'll refer to her as Allie, just to be safe, and because who gives a damn what her real name is?
So Allie's got a fiancé who is rich and a dickhead and I think he's in real estate, because he's trying to convince his lady love to sell her shop so that he can make a lot of money while simultaneously crushing her dreams and aspirations. That's true love.
On their way to the airport to visit fiancé Will's parents for Christmas, he gets called away on business and sends Allie on ahead. She meets Will's brother Matt at the airport after he spills coffee all over her and her phone, preventing her from calling Will and explaining the situation, then on the way to the family home he crashes his car into a fucking tree and they both end up in the hospital. Good first expression!
So Allie falls in love with Matt's family, including his irascible grandfather and his numerous tales of true love, they all sing Christmas carols and decorate a tree and play insipid games and there are so many cute little montages that it just makes me sick. They just all fit so perfectly, it's like fate brought them all together to create the perfect family.
Then Allie tells everybody how she prefers the deformed bastard trees on the Christmas tree lot, the ones that are missing half of their branches and sit crookedly in the tree stand, because she watched the Charlie Brown Christmas special too many times as a child and it warped her fragile mind.
The family finds this charming, but it just doesn't make any sense to me. I haven't even been around a "real" Christmas tree in years, and I don't miss them. The watering, the shedding needles, the constant fire hazard... I'm just fine with the fake tree. I don't need to worry about stringing the lights on it every year, it's got all my nerd ornaments on it, and it spins so I can see all of them without having to ever get out of my chair. And I also despise the smell of pine, so I'm good.
So Will finally shows up to join his family for the holidays and... Uh Oh! It's not Will but Billy, the Mitchum family's other son! It seems there's been A Very Merry Mix-Up and Allie accidentally went home with the wrong family! She thought she was spending the holidays with her future in-laws, but she was actually falling in love with strangers! Oh man! The look on her face when she realizes how fucked up her situation truly is makes me laugh so very much.
Eventually her Will (an only child) comes by and takes her out of a home filled with family love and Christmas cheer into his parents' home, which is a sterile and loveless place filled only with the trappings of wealth and a heaping helping of resentment. Will's parents are absolute cunts, and the father even hits on Allie, which is just creepy.
After folksy old Gramps Mitchum drops off a small clock that Matt made as a gift for Allie, she comes to her senses and escapes her fiancé's house of lies, dumping him like a load of garbage on the side of the street and leaving him to face his own long, dark night of the soul which would be far too depressing to actually see in a movie like this.
Running into the local park, she sees Mart waiting for her, there's some more bullshit talk about magic clocks and destiny and they declare their undying love for each other and oh my god I can't take this anymore.
It's all too much. Matt's family is too fucking nice. They're off-puttingly nice, like "pod people" nice. The kind of nice that feels false, like the family is trying a little too hard to present themselves as pleasant and perfect, when you know there's something rotten and foul festering just under the surface, and if you look a little closer the joyful facade would collapse like a late-stage Jenga tower.
But of course this is a Hallmark Channel original movie, so the facade is all there is. They're just nice, and even though they act like a cult they're supposed to just be a happy family and that's supposed to be endearing, but it just creeped me the fuck out.
And the whole premise of the movie, with Allie accidentally spending the holidays with the wrong family, is so fucking ridiculous that I couldn't get into it. This shit doesn't just happen. But I guess the German clock gods made it all happen in order to bring these two lovebirds together, so they could run her antiques shop into the ground with irresponsible business practices as a team.
It's all so cloying and sweet it makes me sick. You took it too far, A Very Merry Mix-Up! You and your stupid German clock gods!
You know, "German Clock Gods" would make a pretty decent name for a death metal band.
VERDICT: NO.
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