DEBBIE MACOMBER'S DASHING THROUGH THE SNOW
An airport snafu strands a holiday traveler, so she and a kind stranger share the last rental car.
I can't even remember the name of the main character in this movie. I know the actor's name is Meghan Ory, but I am drawing a blank as to the name of the character she played. I wanna say Amber, but I don't think that's right. Amanda? Allie? I suppose it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, so I'll just call her Amber. Amber lives... shit, I don't even remember where she's supposed to live. Not Washington state, since that's where Amber's trying to go in the movie, and it's far enough away from where she lives that she has to book a flight, so I don't think she calls Oregon home.
Let's just say for the sake of argument that Amber lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and she's trying to get to Seattle to spend Christmas with her widowed mother, who has lived alone ever since her deadbeat husband died several years ago, so nowadays she's just an old maid. Is that the definition of an old maid? I'm pretty sure it's just an antiquated term for a woman whom society has deemed past her prime and therefore ineligible for marriage, so maybe the term fits in this case, although it's always been a pretty shitty term to use when you think about it. Who judges which women are too old to make suitable wives? And why isn't there a term for old men who are supposedly "past their prime" and would make terrible husbands? Where are the old butlers?
I adore It's A Wonderful Life. It's not just my favorite Christmas movie of all time, it's one of my favorite movies, period. But the way the movie treats poor Donna Reed's character during George Bailey's glimpse of a world where he had never been born is problematic, to say the least. Dotty Clarence shows befuddled George around
Clarence doesn't want to tell George what's happened to poor Mary Hatch in his absence because it's just too horrible, but a frantic George finally grabs that doughy angel by his lapels and shakes the truth out of his fat little face, and what he learns is simply too much for the paragon of Bedford Falls to bear: Mary Hatch has become... an old maid. A middle-aged woman without a husband? Truly, truly, truly outrageous. George finds Mary locking up after working late at the library, and she looks so plain and mousy with her big glasses and her big coat and it's all just revolting to witness. George freaks out when he sees this abomination that once was his wife, and she screams and runs away when she sees him, because Mary's an old maid and can't even bear to speak to men in public, seeing as how she's all dried up down there nowadays.
This is a bridge too far for old George Bailey, who now wants to live more than ever, if only to have his beautiful Mary back where she belongs, in his kitchen, cooking dinner for him and for their ungrateful children. When you break it down, it's just a really dumb plot twist, and one that doesn't do the movie any favors, especially in the 21st century. Couldn't Frank Capra have thought of anything better to do with Mary Hatch in this twisted mirror universe? Why am I talking about this?
Amber knits and shit, which is I guess her career. Maybe she sells a lot of scarves on Etsy. She seriously just knits all the time. She's knitting in almost every scene in this movie, like she's Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man. Amber has a flight booked for Seattle, but her name has been flagged for some unknown reason and Amber is not allowed to board her plane. Luckily, there's one rental car left on the airport lot, but in order to claim that car, Amber will have to contend with some asshole named... oh no. Greg? Is it Greg? I'm gonna call him Greg. Greg used to be in the military, and I guess he killed a lot of brown people in Afghanistan and the President gave him a medal for killing so many brown people in Afghanistan, but Greg doesn't think he's a hero, because he feels that anybody in his position would have killed just as many brown people in Afghanistan.
In what I feel I must call a rather fortuitous (some would say suspicious) turn of circumstance, Greg just happens to be headed to Seattle anyway, so they join forces and make their trek northward through a nightmarish Yuletide gauntlet in an effort to reach Seattle before the blood moon rises on Christmas Eve and chaos washes over the world for all time.
This is the same premise as A Christmas Detour, which premiered in 2015, the same year as Dashing Through The Snow, but the latter is based on a book of the same name written by Debbie Macomber... which was also published in 2015. That means that Debbie Macomber sold the rights to her book to Hallmark before it was published, so is it just a coincidence that these two movies share an identical premise?
Oh wait, the two movies aren't identical. Dashing Through The Snow has an FBI subplot. The reason Amber's name was flagged at the airport is because somebody using her name is apparently a terrorist or something, and the FBI has reason to believe that Amber is going to blow up Seattle on Christmas Day with a bomb she's hidden inside of a festively wrapped box that's resting in the back of the SUV she's sharing with Greg. So an FBI task force, led in the field by a twitchy young agent who had a nervous breakdown during his last assignment, is following Amber on her trek across America, waiting for the opportune moment to strike this "terrorist" down before she can transform Seattle into a charnel house on Christmas Day.
Oh, and Greg's part of the FBI task force, working undercover to gain Amber's trust and help bring this wanted criminal to justice before she kills again. This is all true, by the way. I'm not making any of this bullshit up, painting a lurid picture in order to make Dashing Through The Snow sound more exciting than it really is, because it's really not exciting. At all. So I guess the whole rental car thing was a setup from the beginning, huh. I'm wracking my brain here, and I honestly can't remember if anything noteworthy even happens during Greg and Amber's journey to Seattle. I'm sure something must have happened, but nothing's ringing any bells.
Oh yeah, she adopts a puppy from Negan. You know Negan, the baseball bat-swinging villain from The Walking Dead? That guy. Not Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the actor who plays Negan on the show. I'm talking about the man himself. Negan gives Amber a puppy in the movie, and she takes it with her back to Seattle.
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| It's gonna be pee-pee pants city here real soon. |
At some point in their journey into terror, Greg learns that Amber has recently become the victim of identity theft, and as such he surmises that whoever this supposed terrorist really is, they've probably assumed Amber's name online in an effort to hide their true identity from the authorities, and he tells his handlers this via text message, but they all believe that this perfectly harmless, knitting-obsessive, puppy-loving lady is public enemy #1, so they tell Greg to keep on his target regardless of his misgivings with the assignment. But then they fall in love! Oh no!
Amber gets arrested by the FBI in front of a bunch of Romanian kids (?) who live in some run-down cabin in the middle of the woods outside of Seattle on Christmas Eve, which isn't at all suspicious. But that big red box the feds thought was filled with sarin gas or something was actually loaded with gifts for the Romanian kids, so after a lengthy apology from the agents, Amber is dropped off at her mother's house just in time for egg nog and gingerbread cookies in front of a roaring fireplace. Greg is stripped of his medal for killing all those brown people in Afghanistan by the President, who throws it in the gutter for the CHUDs to fight over, because even Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers deserve something for Christmas, and Greg feels bad for having to lie to Amber so many times during their romantic holiday journey north.
Why was Amber just hanging out with a bunch of Romanian orphans in the woods? These kids couldn't even speak any English, and they live all alone out in the middle of some forest outside of Seattle? How does Amber know these orphans? How did they meet? And why was Amber delivering Christmas gifts and not, ya know, food? And where is Child Protective Services? What the fuck is going on here, movie? Explain yourself! And these FBI agents were pretty liberal with their sidearms while they were surrounding the cabin, pointing loaded guns at children's faces without hesitation. What if the situation had escalated because these kids got spooked, bolted, and couldn't understand an agent's shouted instructions to hold still? Were these clowns prepared to shoot a bunch of kids on Christmas Eve?
Why did Dashing Through The Snow need this bullshit FBI plot? What did it add to the story? It feels completely superfluous, and that's only because it is, just wasting so much time following these clueless FBI agents who don't know how to properly do their fucking jobs, otherwise they would have detained Amber at the fucking airport and after a short interrogation they would have discovered who she truly was and then Amber would have been allowed to continue her journey to Seattle unmolested. Instead the movie jumps through a series of maddening hoops to keep the feds just one step behind Amber at all times, like a nonsensical detour in some random town where a pair of juvenile delinquents remove the license plate from Amber and Greg's rental car, swapping it with a plate from their mother's car, and the two cars just happen to be identical.
The dumbass agents spot the delinquents driving off in their car with the plates from Amber's rental and just follow them for a while, letting our protagonists unwittingly slip away from the federal dragnet that was ineptly closing in around them. Why did this happen? I have absolutely no fucking idea. But it's entirely moot, since if the fucking FBI wanted Amber so badly, all they had to do was contact Greg and tell him to just wait at some random rest stop on the road for twenty minutes so his handlers can catch up and arrest their so-called terrorist.
There's a point early on when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and I just naturally assumed that Greg had staged this "breakdown" in order to stall for time for the fucking federales to show up and drag Amber off to Guantanamo Bay. But I gave the movie too much credit, since the car just actually stopped working for no reason, giving Amber and Greg the chance to stumble upon a wild Negan in the woods clutching a box of puppies he stole from Rick Grimes just to watch that pussy cry one more time.
There's no excuse for every FBI agent in this movie to be so nonsensically incompetent. If the real FBI operated in this slapdash manner, we would all be dead.
But it's all okay, because Greg and Amber are in love, so on Christmas Day she forgives him for being a complete dick to her during their entire trip, and also for being an undercover FBI agent and lying to her face three hundred times in the past three days, as well as for leading a coterie of gun-toting federal agents to a cabin filled with children on Christmas Eve, any one of whom could have been shot and killed for being mistaken for members of a terrorist cell. It's all water under the bridge, because Amber and Greg had such great chemistry during all those scenes when he was telling her to shut up for no reason or belittling her for her taste in movies or insulting her knitting skills, etc.
It was kismet, I tell ya. These two crazy kids were made for each other.
Dashing Though The Snow- I'm sorry, Debbie Macomber's Dashing Through The Snow -is a festering boil on the backside of Christmas-themed made-for-television family entertainment. It's a pointless and thoughtless waste of time and effort, and I wish I had never sat down to watch it this morning. Show me a world where Dashing Through The Snow was never made, Clarence! Show me a world where Amber became an actual terrorist and blew up half of Seattle on Christmas Eve after being radicalized by watching knitting instructional videos on YouTube!
I Hate You! Kiss Me! - Amber and Greg don't really get along at all for the first hour of the movie, and then the only reason they seem to fall in love is because the plot demands it, since Greg remains the same scowling asshole throughout.
Scrooged! - Greg hates Christmas and doesn't have time for any of this happy holidays bullshit, until he learns to believe in the magic of the season of miracles or whatever after falling in love with Amber...
Secret Santa - ...and some "sage advice" from Santa Claus. Yeah, Santa Claus makes an appearance in this movie. At first glance, he appears to be just your average street corner Saint Nick, ringing his bell and going "ho ho ho" for charity, but he knows things about Greg that Greg's never told anybody. Santa knows how many brown people Greg really killed in Afghanistan, and he also tells this slick murderer to take a chance on love before what's left of his soul is swallowed up by the lord of the abyss on New Year's Day.
Mommy's Dead - Amber's daddy fell off a fire escape headfirst while on a bender and his head exploded like a watermelon on the sidewalk below. For the people walking around down there, it must have seemed like they had front-row seats for the worst Gallagher show in history, and without the benefit of splash guards.
Little White Lies - Greg's lies seem a little bigger than what the name of this trope implies, but it's just gonna have to do.
Third Act Shenanigans - Oh boy.
Christmas In July! - They weren't even trying in this movie. There are some scattered stock footage shots of cars driving through real snow, but whenever we find our romantic leads outside it's all sunny skies, leaf-laden trees and green, green grass as far as the eye can see.
Assistant Chef Jen - You asked for miracles, Theo, I give you the F-B-I.
VERDICT:
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