You may be wondering why, after a prolonged hiatus, I have returned to this forsaken blog with what appears to be yet another made-for-television Christmas movie review, considering the last time I did this, I was so disgusted with the entire experience that it almost destroyed my love of Christmas entirely. It's also the end of March, which is not exactly the time of year most closely associated with Christmas, seeing as how Easter Sunday is this weekend, so what the hell is going on?
It's quite simple, really, so allow me to explain. During last year's Schlock-Mas celebration, I watched and reviewed a movie called Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge, which was actually only half of Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge, with the second half of this epic story, despite being completed and ready to air, scheduled to premiere one year later as a part of 2016's holiday festivities on Hallmark Channel, the black, atrophied heart of television. As you might imagine, this did not go over well with the network's key demographic of middle-aged, stay-at-home mothers, who took to social media en masse to voice their displeasure in what I'm sure was a very polite-and-yet-condescending manner.
As such, the spineless pricks at Hallmark Channel pissed all over themselves in an existential panic and quickly shoved the second and final chapter of Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge saga into their schedule this past weekend, and seeing as how March 25th is CHRISTMAS TWO!!!, I've decided it's only appropriate to subject myself to a little more holiday-themed misery by telling you all about it. So without further ado...
KAREN KINGSBURY'S THE BRIDGE, PART TWO
A woman reunites with an old flame while trying to save a beloved bookstore (for real, this time).
Seven years have passed since star-crossed lovers Billy and Wally were torn apart by Wally's meddling father and the couple's own innate stupidity, and things are going fine for everybody, I guess. Wally's turning 25 in a few weeks and is set to become the new CEO of her daddy's multi-million dollar corporation on her birthday, because that makes sense. Billy's been touring with some anonymous musical collective for several years, making good money and seeing the country, having a marvelous time playing his guitar and making panties drop in honky-tonks all across this great nation. But something's missing in their lives of quiet desperation, as they each can't help but fondly remember those cozy three months they once spent fondling each other under the approving gaze of Charlie and Donna at The Bridge nearly a decade ago.
Charlie and Donna, meanwhile, are doing great. Their business was essentially destroyed by a powerful thunderstorm several months prior, and their garbage insurance company refused to pay out their policy, so Charlie just spends his days wandering around town, a false smile plastered on his weathered face, assuring locals that The Bridge is due to re-open at any time, while Donna just sits in the ruins of their once-thriving business, weeping into a cursed antique handkerchief. After a local bank refuses to give Charlie a loan to help repair The Bridge solely because if he had been approved for a loan, there would be no movie, Charlie cries in his wife's trembling arms as he realizes that his dream is truly dead, and later that night he loses control of his car driving over black ice in a torrential fake snow storm and plows into a utility pole, leaving him in a coma just a few weeks before Christmas.
So they're doing just fine.
A meddling nurse at the hospital steals Donna's phone and calls everybody on her contacts list to tell them that her husband is on life support for the holidays, including Wally, the moon-faced girl who met Donna a few times seven years prior then moved away and never contacted anyone in town again. I'm not even sure why Donna would have ever had Wally's number to begin with, so why would she still have her number seven years after the last time they spoke? Seriously, I think these two characters shared maybe two scenes in the last movie, and now they're supposed to be best pals, like Superman and Jimmy Olsen? Either way, Wally jumps on a plane and heads back to Tennessee to do... something to help Charlie and Donna out of this mess.
Coincidentally, Billy's back in Belmont, finding work as a musical act at Sucky, the biggest country & western massage parlor in town. His empty, unblinking eyes register no emotion when he learns that Charlie, that lovable son of a gun who used to buy Billy condoms and sixers of Miller High Life when he was a teenager, is hooked up to a bunch of arcane devices at the hospital and that The Bridge is in shambles. He lazily pledges to do... something to help Charlie and Donna out of this mess.
The two lovebirds meet at the hospital and try to play it cool, but they just want to jump each other's bones like a pair of horny monkeys locked in a rusty cage and everybody knows it, but they refuse to act on their feelings because it's not the fucking third act yet and nothing can actually happen in this goddamned movie until the final twenty minutes! For the love of all things holy, three quarters of this fucking experience is Ted McGinley lying in a hospital bed with an Ace bandage wrapped around his head, and these two fucking soulless leads just trying not to be a couple despite there being no good reason for them not to get back together.
Wally assumes that Billy is with another woman, even though the only other woman he ever dated married some other dude years ago and told Wally flat-out earlier in the movie that they never got back together, and Billy assumes that Wally is engaged to her Seattle-based stalker Billington Farnsworth, Esq. because she's wearing her late mother's engagement ring, even though she's only wearing her late mother's engagement ring because she assumes that Billy is no longer on the market and doesn't want him to think she's some kind of 25-year-old spinster or anything like that. If one of these dumb fucks would bother actually talking to the other about anything other than that fucking sinkhole that used to be a bookstore, they would have worked all of this shit out five minutes into the movie.
But Wally's father eventually comes looking for his wayward daughter, and he even lets it slip to his daughter that he called Billy seven years ago and played him a doctored recording of Wally (erroneously) proclaiming her love for Fredrickson Silverstein IX, admitting that he sabotaged the last seven years of her life because he's an oily prick who doesn't care about his daughter's happiness. So she calls her old man a doodyhead and runs off to tell Billy that her batcave is once again open for business, but she overhears some random bald asshole mention that Billy may (I emphasize may) agree to go on a lucrative international tour with some big musician the movie refuses to name, so she decides to just not say anything, because it's still technically the movie's second act, and NOTHING is allowed to happen in this movie before the third act.
Finally, mercifully, the third act begins, Billy and Wally begin a fundraising drive to re-open The Bridge, people from all over North America send in money and books to help the cause, Donna is badgered into praying for her comatose husband by that meddling nurse, and the moment she asks God to show a little mercy, Charlie opens his eyes on Christmas Eve and everybody comes to visit the kindly couple and tell them how much they matter to the community and they show Charlie all of the donations and The Bridge is saved due to an anonymous benefactor and it's all very touching and I may have misted up just a little bit because I am not an emotionless monster.
 |
| Not like this asshole. |
Billy notices Wally at the celebrations and tries to talk to her, but she disappears, and Billy rushes after her to tell her how much he loves her and how they were meant to be together and all of that good stuff, but he finds a note on his truck from Wally telling him to have fun on his world tour, and instead of going to the airport to tell her he's decided to stay in Belmont and follow his true dream of being a songwriter due to the timely intervention of a wealthy record executive and that there;s no reason for them not to be a couple...
...he just gives up. Seriously, this brainless stack of rancid meat just gives up, choosing to let the love of his life get on a plane and fly away forever, leaving him alone and miserable in the middle of fucking Tennessee. If he didn't just coincidentally run into Wally at The Bridge on his way home, they never would've gotten together. That's where she was, by the way. She was hanging out in the ruins of The Bridge, crying because she didn't want to leave the idyllic hamlet of Belmont, Tennessee, mustering her courage to finally head to the airport and return to her life-in-progress up in Seattle, and Billy hears her loud, donkey-like braying from well outside the building and decides to investigate, and so they finally fucking reconcile because there are only two minutes left in this movie and suddenly we jump forward one year to the grand re-opening of The Bridge, and Wally's father returns to fix his shattered relationship with his daughter, helping her open a charitable foundation in Belmont so she can stay close to her successful singer-songwriter hubby Billy and their extended family at The Bridge, and Merry Christmas in late March, everybody!
This movie shouldn't exist. It simply shouldn't exist. Watching Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge, Part Two, I'm fully convinced that this had no right to be a two-part, four-hour event. There is so much pointless wheel-spinning in both parts, but particularly in part two, that it just makes me sick. This bloated mess could have been trimmed down to a two-or-three-hour-long movie, and that would've been more than enough time and space to tell the entire story without missing a fucking thing. And part two does nothing more to flesh out the poorly-written Anonymous Female Lead and Anonymous Male Lead, portrayed by the same bored-looking empty vessels without any appreciable growth in their characters, despite seven years having passed between two movies. They're the same worthless excuses for romantic leads in part two that they were in part one, with absolutely no chemistry, and as such I couldn't be bothered to give a damn about them.
Once again, this movie would've been better served by focusing more on the misadventures of Charlie and Donna as they're the only characters in this story struggling through real high-stakes drama. I'm sure this two-part movie is only following the same structure of Karen Kingsbury's novel, which means the true flaws lie in the source material, but there should have been a discussion at some point during development about whether to shift the story's focus to the more richly-realized and inherently interesting characters of Charlie and Donna as they build a new life for each other in the aftermath of an unthinkable tragedy (Donna's miscarriage) with The Bridge, then watch years later as the town of Belmont comes together to lift them up as they struggle through hard times, rebuilding The Bridge as a new cornerstone of their close-knit community.
That story still takes place, but merely as the backdrop for one of the most uninteresting young adult romances I have ever seen in pop culture, and it's a fucking travesty. If Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge were a two-hour made-for-television movie about middle-aged couple Charlie and Donna and their book-slinging adventures in Belmont, Tennessee, it would've been good. Really good, perhaps. In the right hands, it could've even had the potential to be be a modern classic, and that's not hyperbole. The bones of something soulful and heartfelt are right there in the material. But alas, that is not what Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge became, and the world is a poorer place for that.
And aside from all that, Hallmark Channel's bizarre release strategy regarding the two-part movie was so asinine, so utterly wrong-headed, and it upset me to such a ridiculous degree that I'm not sure I could've given this second chapter of the story an even shake regardless of its quality. But its quality is piss-poor, so I don't feel bad about hating Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge, Part Two. I feel bad knowing that I've wasted four hours of my life that I can never get back watching this nonsense, but that's on me. So I'm the idiot.
Honestly, this whole movie takes place in Tennessee over two winters, and it all looks like it was shot in the heart of summer somewhere in British Columbia, which it absolutely was, and as such absolutely fucking nobody has anything approaching a natural Tennessee accent. Literally nobody even tries for something vaguely southern, which is just goddamned lazy. These fucks didn't even try to make their location look at all wintry, with flowers in full bloom and trees filled with lush, green leaves prominently on display in every single exterior shot. There's a sequence where Ted McGinley is walking down Main Street in a jacket and scarf, and he's fucking sweating bullets, because it's probably eighty-five degrees outside and the poor man on camera is suffering from heat exhaustion. Dump as much fake snow on your locations as you want, it's not fooling anybody, you lousy cocksuckers!
Have you ever been to Tennessee in December? News flash: it gets fucking cold in Tennessee in December!
But that's in the past. Karen Kingsbury's The Bridge is now dead and buried. I'm finally finished with this garbage, and I can now move on with my life, whatever the hell that means.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TWO, EVERYBODY!
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