Well, it’s official. I’m very firmly in the Hallmark target demographic. A ’90s Christmas isn’t a movie about a woman who goes back in time to the tender age of 24 to say yes to her true love in 1992. It’s about a woman who time travels back to being a teenager in 1999. At least one kid better be wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt over a white long-sleeved t-shirt or this isn’t true to life (I’ll also accept a Korn hoodie).
Workaholic lawyer Lucy Miller is celebrating her promotion alone on Christmas Eve when a mysterious rideshare experience transports her back to 1999. Reliving the holiday with her mom, sister and best friend – not to mention her high school crush – Lucy gets a second chance to understand where her relationships went wrong. Will this magical journey help her rewrite her future or leave her destined to be alone? Starring Eva Bourne, Chandler Massey, Katherine Barrell and Alex Hook.
Ooh, a workaholic lawyer who is forced to go home for Christmas? We’re going back to our Hallmark romcom roots!
RECAP
Lucy is a hot, glasses-wearing divorce lawyer who has committed the greatest sin in Hallmark: she likes to work.
She loves to work so much that she consistently ignores the sanctity of Christmas. This has finally earned her the big promotion that she has been gunning for over the last 20 years. That’s right, baby. Lucy made partner!
While reveling in her good fortune, she gets a call from her sister who begs Lucy to come home for Christmas and share memories about their DEAD FATHERTM. Lucy tells her sister to shove it. She’s planning to celebrate her big promotion at a Denny’s!
Before celebrating with a Grand Slam, she plays a quick game of office pool with her assistant where she exposition dumps about not having a boyfriend.
Her pancake party is interrupted by a man named Matt, Lucy’s former next-door neighbor and childhood friend. The whole chance meeting is sad and weird. Matt is an insurance salesman (ewwww!) who never became an actor and is currently going through a divorce. Even worse, Lucy is a lonely, wealthy spinster.
Matt takes the opportunity to tell Lucy that she has a bad habit of peacing out on people, including him 20 years ago. He asks if she ever thinks of what could’ve been if life had gone differently. Mind you, the whole conversation takes about five minutes, so we go from “hello” to existential hypotheticals. Lucy says no, she doesn’t think of that. Matt leaves with his batch of empty coffee cup props.
But there’s no time to parse what just happened because a woman barges into Lucy’s booth and starts grilling Lucy with incredibly intrusive questions. The lady asks her if she’d like a do-over on life. Lucy, once again, has to affirm to a nosy person that she is fine with the way she’s living.
Lucy orders an Uber and to her surprise the Uber driver is the nosy woman. The woman kidnaps the high-powered lawyer and dumps her at her family’s home in Milwaukee…in 1999! Not realizing that she’s time traveled, Lucy goes to bed.
Lucy awakens the next morning to the dulcet sounds of Sixpence None the Richer. She slowly realizes that she is no longer in 2024.
Lucy reads about Y2K in the morning paper. She later meets with the mystery angel person to find out just what the hell is going on. The only evidence she has of being from 2024 is her official promotion letter. The characters directly reference A Christmas Carol and Back to the Future because this movie is heavily “inspired” by both. The lady tells Lucy that she has the chance to change her future and get everything she wants. Lucy, once again, asserts that she is happy with her normal life.
We’re in a bit of a PEN15 situation where all the 30-something year-old actors play themselves as 16–19-year-olds. The 19-year-old law firm partner has breakfast with her mom and sister.
Lucy runs into next-door neighbor Matt, who now has a middle part in his hair. He says something about Mambo No. 5 and calls her lobster. She quickly runs over to her best friend Nadine who greets Lucy with a “Wasssuuuup!”, a catchphrase that sucked back then and still sucks now. Since Nadine’s brain hasn’t fully formed, she believes Lucy when she tells her that time travel is real and her actions will affect the future. Nadine tells Lucy that to go back to her time, she will need to kiss Matt.
Lucy meets Matt’s middle part at a diner where they talk about colleges. Lucy has to choose between Northwestern where she’s been offered a full scholarship and Columbia where she’ll have to pay out-of-state tuition. Matt clearly didn’t hear “full ride scholarship” because he intimates that she should go to Columbia because it’ll be closer to his school.
Lucy spontaneously kisses Matt to see if she’ll get to go home to her Roth IRA. It doesn’t work. Worse yet, her promotion letter isn’t taking the time travel very well since sentences are slowly disappearing.
Lucy takes part in something called the Reindeer Games. It’s just an excuse to do a few Christmas montage scenes.
The two neighbors win the Reindeer Games. They celebrate with waffles and discuss Lucy’s college choices as well as her DEAD FATHERTM.
The next day, we get a scene where we are treated to an iMac G3 and the horrible modem sound. We also find out that Matt is a Friends fan.
That night, Lucy gets to see her DEAD GRANDPARENTSTM alive again. We get a Y2K discussion and a Gameboy reference.
Because she’s actually a 40-something woman, Lucy doles out wisdom to her mom, her sister, and Matt. She convinces Matt to tell his parents about his acting dreams. It’s that or become an insurance salesman (ewww!). She helps her mom overcome the grief of losing a spouse. And she tells her sister that it’s ok to be gay. Despite fixing everyone’s problems, Lucy’s letter just keeps getting blanker.
She and Matt go ice skating where they talk about college again and Lucy has to keep telling her neighbor that she’d prefer to get a full ride scholarship. They almost kiss, but Lucy gets cold feet.
Lucy can’t face not getting a promotion, so she decides to stop being nice to everyone. She tells Matt to kick rocks, she’s not gonna pay full price for an education! Matt gets pissy about it and tells her that she’s going to be lonely if she keeps this behavior up. This conversation is enough to un-erase her promotion letter.
At home, Lucy plays pool with her grandfather and playfully cleans cupcake frosting off her mother’s nose. Her plan to become a bitch is failing. Realizing this, she races upstairs to grab a mixtape/CD that she made for Matt.
She meets Matt to tell him that she loves him and wants to get into college debt. He tells her he calls her lobster because of that one Friends episode (ugh). They kiss and time speeds forward.
Lucy is again 40-something and ends up with a husband, an estate law attorney job, two kids, and big glasses. Her mom has gotten over her grief, Lucy’s sister is married to a beautiful woman, and Matt watched Wicked a record 13x during its opening run. Everyone lives happily ever after in 2024.
REVIEW
The beginning and the end of the film were the romance part while the middle was more about Lucy and her family getting over their DEAD FATHERTM. In her previous life, Lucy never reckoned with it. But in her new life, she and the rest of the family move past it in a day. They managed to speedrun grief. The Matt subplot was the boring part of the film. He bordered on being a petulant baby. But even though a late 20s/early 30s man was playing him, I half-excused him because who wasn’t a jerk at 19? That’s actually a big part of what makes the film make sense. Everyone is 19, so their erratic behavior can be explained. This is not the case for most Hallmark films where the characters are all 30+ and make deranged decisions. To solve this, Hallmark should make all their characters 19. It’ll help the audience wave away most of the unhinged life choices.
Anyway, no one wore a backwards cap like the Limp Bizkit guy, so the film loses half a point for that oversight.
Rating: 3 out of 5 Baha Men
STRAY THOUGHTS
- Making partner is the only thing romcoms know about lawyers.
- Only four minutes in and we have two gay characters.
- This movie just craps all over insurance salesmen. Apparently, they’re the scum of the earth.
- When Matt is first introduced, I thought, “Oh it’s that guy that looks like a baby child.” And, yeah, they picked him because every character plays their teenage selves.
- I like the 90s minivans. Good work, prop people.
- The moment I heard Kiss Me play in this movie, I groaned “Nooooo!” because it dawned on me that I was Hallmark-old now.
- Yeah, the Backstreet Boys are mentioned in this. No nods to Nsync so who really won the boy band wars?
- Lucy doesn’t need those glasses.
- I think they paid for Kiss Me and one other song. Getting the rights to Smooth by Santana was outside of the budget.
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