“You’re Starting to Sound Like those Old Romance Movies.”
I noticed recently that Hallmark has a couple of romantic movies set in National Parks. They sounded like they could be fun, so I decided to watch them, starting with Love in Glacier National: A National Park Romance. Sadly, the result was less than ideal.
Heather (Ashley Newbrough) is a scientist who has developed a new computer modeling system to help better predict avalanches. She is thrilled when she is invited to Glacier National Park to show it off. She’ll be working with her friend Eric (Devon Alexander). The only downside is that it means she can’t take the trip to Maui she had planned with her sister, but she talks Riley (Tegan Moss) into joining her at the mountain resort where she will be staying instead.
The only person not remotely interested in Heather’s program is Chris (Stephen Huszar), the head of the search and rescue program, who prefers to trust his own carefully crafted skills instead of a computer program. Despite that, neither can deny the sparks that fly between them. Will Heather win Chris over to her program? Or is their romance doomed to fail?
If you’ve read enough of my reviews, you know I have no issue with predictable stories as long as I’m having fun. That wasn’t the case here. I pretty much had all the beats of the movie figured out early on. Some took a little longer to predict just because those subplots hadn’t been introduced yet.
But I wasn’t having fun. Instead, I found myself cringing as the writers made the characters go through these familiar tropes in the most awkward way possible. It wasn’t fun; it was painful.
Despite this, I did like Heather and Chris. The actors have great chemistry, and I really did want to see them wind up happy at the end.
Then there’s Riley and her sub-plot. I actually found her matchmaking tactics cringe inducing, but I still got invested in her sub-plot. Which just kind of disappeared as we ramped up to the climax. I was very frustrated by that.
Obviously, the writing wasn’t the sharpest, and that bled over to the performances. There was only so much the actors could do with some of that dialogue. Overall, this had a low budget production quality to it.
There is a reason I’ve pretty much stuck to Hallmark’s mystery movies before now – I find their others to be more hit and miss than the mysteries. Love in Glacier National was definitely in the miss category.
I watch all the new movies on Hallmark, which I started doing 2 years ago, and I can say this is one of the worst Hallmark movies ever made. It's one of the few I gave only one star. I find that the National Parks movies are in general some of the worst. The scenery is nice, but the plots and writing are weak. But I think this is the worst out of all of them.
ReplyDeleteCorrection: I don't watch all the new Christmas movies because there are too many, but I watch all other new ones, in addition to some older ones.
Delete