It's pretty typical in a holiday romance to find the cast clad in shades of crimson, maroon and scarlet, emphasising how characters embracing the traditional colour palette of the season have also embraced the Christmas spirit. Never, though, have I seen this trope pushed as much as in this movie, during which virtually every character spends almost every scene wearing seasonal red somewhere in their outfit. I can only imagine there was a special offer if the wardrobe department bulk bought in just one colour. The red is so prevalent that the conclusion to what passes for a love triangle is immediately telegraphed by the heroine's boyfriend being the only character not constantly dressed in the otherwise ubiquitous colour. And it's this kind of application of genre tropes with maximum laziness that characterizes this movie throughout.
It's not really a problem that the plot of Correcting Christmas - in which Kelly Overton (taking a break from vampires between True Blood and Van Helsing) gets a magical do-over to go back and correct her romantic mistakes of a Christmas past - is the sort of thing we've all seen before. After all, audiences for this kind of TV movie holiday romance expect, and often even demand, a certain amount of comfortingly predictable tropes. The chance to return to your past, do things differently and take the road not travelled remains a popular conceit for magical romance for good reason (The Family Man with Nicolas Cage would be the obvious festive take on the theme in high budget mainstream film). There isn't a viewer out there who doesn't have a past regret or two and a curiosity about how things could have turned out otherwise. So it's formulaic, yes, but it's a formula with pretty universal appeal. It's not the generic setup that's relevant here, though, it's all about how well it's executed. And that's where Correcting Christmas really comes apart.
This is a movie that doesn't just fail to pull off one convincing relationship, but does so twice for good measure. A lot of time is spent on how bad a match for her the boyfriend of Overton's Ali really is (largely expressed via the fact that he really doesn't care about the magic of Christmas or sharing it with family). In fact, it's the focus of so much of the movie that it's really hard to buy this being a relationship that has been going for years and where she honestly both expects and wishes for a Christmas proposal.
At the other corner of the "love triangle" there's Nick (so named because there's only about five festive names to go round the love interests in these movies). Ali's high school best friend, who once had a thing for her before she moved to the big city, and is now a hunky Christmas-loving small town builder, Nick is cut from the pretty standard (red plaid) cloth of a holiday movie love interest. But the movie seems to think that recognising the familiar tropes and being aware that Nick and Ali will end up together is enough that it never actually has to convince us of them as a romantic pairing. In fact, they share all of five or six scenes together in the entire movie, all brief conversations. It's also odd that the movie deems it worth mentioning her passion for her job as an architect, but does nothing with the potential connection to him being a builder. (At least have them make a gingerbread house together or something!)
In a moment of uncharacteristic self-awareness Nick even straight up tells her that they've barely talked since high school, aren't really even Facebook friends anymore and that she's probably just projecting her dissatisfaction with her current relationship onto an imagined version of him. But then in their very next scene together he's the one pushing for a happily ever after.
This sort of lack of effort isn't Correcting Christmas's only flaw (the third male lead - Ali's brother - is insufferable, with many of the same personal issues that the movie sees as problems for both Ali and her no-good boyfriend, yet he gets a happy ending without really learning or growing at all), but it is the big one. One that makes its other less-than-stellar elements harder to overlook.
In the end, then, all that red is more likely to indicate a stop sign for potential viewers of this movie than a mark of passion.
It's not really a problem that the plot of Correcting Christmas - in which Kelly Overton (taking a break from vampires between True Blood and Van Helsing) gets a magical do-over to go back and correct her romantic mistakes of a Christmas past - is the sort of thing we've all seen before. After all, audiences for this kind of TV movie holiday romance expect, and often even demand, a certain amount of comfortingly predictable tropes. The chance to return to your past, do things differently and take the road not travelled remains a popular conceit for magical romance for good reason (The Family Man with Nicolas Cage would be the obvious festive take on the theme in high budget mainstream film). There isn't a viewer out there who doesn't have a past regret or two and a curiosity about how things could have turned out otherwise. So it's formulaic, yes, but it's a formula with pretty universal appeal. It's not the generic setup that's relevant here, though, it's all about how well it's executed. And that's where Correcting Christmas really comes apart.
This is a movie that doesn't just fail to pull off one convincing relationship, but does so twice for good measure. A lot of time is spent on how bad a match for her the boyfriend of Overton's Ali really is (largely expressed via the fact that he really doesn't care about the magic of Christmas or sharing it with family). In fact, it's the focus of so much of the movie that it's really hard to buy this being a relationship that has been going for years and where she honestly both expects and wishes for a Christmas proposal.
At the other corner of the "love triangle" there's Nick (so named because there's only about five festive names to go round the love interests in these movies). Ali's high school best friend, who once had a thing for her before she moved to the big city, and is now a hunky Christmas-loving small town builder, Nick is cut from the pretty standard (red plaid) cloth of a holiday movie love interest. But the movie seems to think that recognising the familiar tropes and being aware that Nick and Ali will end up together is enough that it never actually has to convince us of them as a romantic pairing. In fact, they share all of five or six scenes together in the entire movie, all brief conversations. It's also odd that the movie deems it worth mentioning her passion for her job as an architect, but does nothing with the potential connection to him being a builder. (At least have them make a gingerbread house together or something!)
In a moment of uncharacteristic self-awareness Nick even straight up tells her that they've barely talked since high school, aren't really even Facebook friends anymore and that she's probably just projecting her dissatisfaction with her current relationship onto an imagined version of him. But then in their very next scene together he's the one pushing for a happily ever after.
This sort of lack of effort isn't Correcting Christmas's only flaw (the third male lead - Ali's brother - is insufferable, with many of the same personal issues that the movie sees as problems for both Ali and her no-good boyfriend, yet he gets a happy ending without really learning or growing at all), but it is the big one. One that makes its other less-than-stellar elements harder to overlook.
In the end, then, all that red is more likely to indicate a stop sign for potential viewers of this movie than a mark of passion.