So before I get this review for Falling for Christmas started I need to come clean. Christmas rom-coms are my least favorite type of movie. Hands down. I find them super shallow and very rarely stand out from the slog, which is only made worse by the same story being made a hundred times each year by a different studio/streaming service with the most minor details changed. It’s always this busy business person who is too busy to enjoy the holidays until they meet a middle to lower-class person from their hometown who teaches them the true meaning of Christmas. Bonus points if the love interest is a single parent. Call me the Grinch if you’d like but these movies just do absolutely nothing for me.
Bitterness aside, I came into this movie completely blind to everything except the fact that Lindsay Lohan was back, and boy was I happy to hear that. Whether it was the Parent Trap or Freaky Friday, Lindsay Lohan was constantly on my TV growing up and I can’t complain about that at all. I really, truly enjoyed her presence on my screen again and it made Falling for Christmas watchable for me. She looked absolutely stunning in this movie. Her relationship with Jake’s (the love interest) daughter is adorable from the start and helps me buy into the story. She hits her beat when she’s able to show that she’s not just some rich, dumb person, that she has depth and is just trying to figure out who she is.
The cinematography is also great. I love the wide, long shots of the North Star lodge which legitimately looks like what I dreamed the North Pole did as a kid. And as heartless as I have sounded so far, this movie does bring me that good ole Christmas warmth. The atmosphere at the North Star Lodge truly feels like someplace you can bring your family to enjoy the holiday experience to the max. The amnesia plotline is unique enough for this story and I did like that, as well as Jake working to accept that he has to move on from his wife’s passing.
Back to the bitterness, there’s a lot you really just have to turn your brain off for. The acting is very meh, the story isn’t really anything special, the CGI looks pretty bad and the non-ski lodge scenes look very cheap. You can tell that this is a Netflix original in the worst ways. Also, a major plot point is that Jake doesn’t remember meeting Lindsay Lohan’s character before she loses her memory, even though he had spilled his hot chocolate on her and was embarrassingly removed from the lodge earlier that day. I’m sorry but I think you might remember that, even if you didn’t catch her name. And with Jake, I wanted to like him, I really did.
But there really isn’t enough that separated him from the other white-bread love interests in these types of movies. I think the problem was they made him too good in a way. Like there’s a line where another woman is talking to Lindsay about all the times he’s volunteered, all the money he’s donated, and all the charities he’s helped out. It’s ok to give people flaws, it makes them more relatable and easier to get invested in. I did think he and Lindsay had fine chemistry for the most part, which is all you can ask for when you look at this movie in a vacuum.
Final Thoughts
Falling For Christmas was enjoyable enough as a movie to get me into the holiday mood. Is it revolutionary? No, which is fine. Lindsey Lohan is very enjoyable and while the plot isn’t anything really new, it is a feel-good story that I think many people can and will enjoy this holiday season.
