Twelve Days Of Schlock-Mas: Day Four

12 MEN OF CHRISTMAS

A public relations executive uses her media savvy to stir excitement in a small Montana town. 

 

I took a pretty big risk with this one. You see, 12 Men Of Christmas isn't a Hallmark Channel original movie, but rather a Lifetime original movie. This means the big leap from TV-G to TV-PG, which means naughty words like "damn" and "crap", plenty of sexual innuendo, and cleavage, cleavage, cleavage. 

Seriously, I'm pretty sure it's literally against the rules for telefilms with a TV-G rating to actually show more than a hint of a woman's bosom, or even imply that people have sex. 

These movies exist in such a chaste, gee whiz universe that you can't even imagine the characters who populate it thinking about having sex. It's a world where magical storks deliver newborn children conjured from the rays of the morning sun to loving couples that wish upon a shooting star for their fondest dreams of a happy family to come true. These characters don't have genitalia; they're just life sized dolls acting out a repressed screenwriter's sanitized fantasies of a just and romantic world. 

But Lifetime knows that romance doesn't come without sex, so they liberally season their original movies with so many cringe-worthy euphemisms for all that naughty stuff that Hallmark likes to pretend doesn't exist that I can't help but feel that maybe they go a little too far from time to time, even using their network's added leeway for "clever" sexual humor to attempt to cover up some of the flaws in their stories.
 

This brings me to 12 Men Of Christmas, starring Kristin Chenowith and Josh Hopkins, AKA that guy who's banging Courteney Cox on Cougartown. 

It's a movie about a driven executive who loses her high-paying job in New York after finding out that her fiancé is screwing the boss on Christmas Eve, so she takes a new position as head of the tourist board in Dildo Falls, Montana, spending the next twelve months trying to bring in a series of big corporate clients to use this idyllic community for their annual employee retreats. Along the way, she finds a noble cause worth celebrating, a new appreciation for the slower pace of small town life... and maybe even a shot at true love. 

And it's all thanks to smut. Smut? Smut. That's right, kids! SMUT! Our heroine learns that the local search and rescue squad, an all-volunteer force that pulls locals and tourists alike out of life-threatening situations is woefully underfunded, so she decides to raise a whole bunch of money for the cause with a... a sexy calendar. Twelve titilating photos of nearly-nude fire fighters and paramedics in the woods, flexing their well-oiled bodies for the leering eyes of bored housewives all across the great state of Montana. Smut for a good cause, in other words. And after only a little coaxing, she convinces all of her beefcakes to bare it all for charity, because I guess she's good at her job. So this softcore calendar manages to bring the entire community together, and it also makes  Kristin Chenowith feel like she's an integral part of a close-knit and loving community, which is something she never even knew she wanted. A Christmas miracle!

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this movie. For a start, despite its title the film is barely about Christmas. Five minutes in and the movie's left Christmas behind as Kristin Chenowith relocates to Montana in early January to begin her new job away from the bad memories of New York City. And for the next hour and twenty minutes, the movie forgets all bout Christmas right up until the very end, when she reconciles with Josh Hopkins at a Christmas Eve party to celebrate the calendar's success. So 12 Men Of Christmas pretty conclusively fails on the "holiday cheer" front.
 

As far as the main romance plot plays out, it's all over the place. Hopkins is a womanizing dick, and Chenowith isn't interested, then they just fall in love. One minute, they hate each other. The next minute, they're basking in post-coital bliss, sitting in front of the fireplace and giggling together while he rubs her feet. It's very confusing, and I briefly wondered if perhaps I had missed a scene or two of character building, something, anything to explain why these people suddenly can't keep their hands off each other.

Of course they were going to fall in love; that's the whole point of the fucking movie, but the story doesn't even adequately explain why they fall in love. Is he the only eligible bachelor in the entire fucking town? The George Clooney of Dicklick, Montana? The script doesn't even make an attempt to justify their relationship, it just shrugs and forces them to be in love, despite their characters having absolutely no chemistry and no reason to even be friends.

Then the moment she gets the opportunity to return to New York for a big new job, which she isn't even thrilled about and seemed likely to turn down due to her finding a new home in charming Black Hole, Montana, he drives her away by acting like a crazy person because his ex-fiancé was a cheating bitch who broke his heart and this situation is somehow exactly like that one, despite the fact that it isn't. At all. I honestly don't understand why this complication is even in the movie. It does nothing but needlessly pad out the narrative an extra five minutes, because she immediately realizes she misses her new beau and the life she's made for herself in Bumfuck, Montana, so she goes back and everybody's happy and the movie ends. This shit doesn't work, and it's incredibly frustrating.

But the movie doesn't get everything wrong. I like how the movie tends to avoid moments of traditional telefilm drama that so many other films of this variety indulge in, like a lack of a prominent antagonist. There's no big villain to overcome, no evil force holding anybody back. Instead, the only real problems and obstacles in 12 Men Of Christmas are the characters' own insecurities and prejudices. And they tend to overcome these issues without any cloying melodrama.

A big example: there's never a big scene involving some kind of decency committee threatening to disrupt the launch of the calendar. This is a small town that isn't used to risqué stuff like a semi-nude calendar, even if it is being marketed for a good cause, so any hack writer could mine that for some pointless drama, but this movie waves off those concerns in a quick comedy sequence, and nobody really has any problems with the smut calendar. It's rather nice to see a movie avoid the obvious, especially a movie like this, that tends to wallow in the obvious. Hell, I don't think the "shirtless dude calendar" plot would even make it past the initial concept stage on Hallmark Channel.
 

That's why the relationship drama bullshit in the third act falls so flat for me. There's no good reason for any of it to happen, so it comes off feeling more like an obligation of the genre rather than an organic plot development. It's like the producers took a second look at the script and panicked when they noticed a "lack of traditional drama" and shoehorned in this crap at the last minute. 

I just don't know what to think of 12 Men Of Christmas. The cast is all relatively good. I really like Kristin Chenowith in just about anything, so she's hardly the problem. A lot of the innuendo and sex-based one-liners just feel like overcompensation for a network that can get away with more adult content, as it doesn't really serve the plot. The relationship drama just doesn't work. And the most damning sin: it doesn't feel like a Christmas movie. 

Nice try, Lifetime, but better luck next time. 

VERDICT: NAUGHTY