Well, let’s put a bow on Christmas and usher in the new year with this shining star of a movie from Pureflix. In this movie, high-school senior Anna is SO over her parents and their Christianity! Now, she can’t go to the town’s annual Winter Ball because it conflicts with Christmas Eve service at church. So she huffily wishes into her pillow that her parents didn’t even believe in God and boy oh boy can you imagine WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? That’s right, she gets up the next morning and her parents have thrown out the nativity scene, haven’t bothered to cook her breakfast and are off to their office where they’ve decided to be money-hungry cutthroat lawyers instead of helping people keep their homes when the banks try to foreclose. They’re working FOR the banks now! YIKES! Anyway, this is as cheesy as it sounds and very cheaply made. Anna Fricks is actually pretty good in the lead role; she has some charisma and she got a few laughs out of me. And Joey Lawrence (!) and Leigh-Allyn Baker (from Will & Grace) are the parents, so, while they aren’t exactly slaying me with their comedic chops, they know how to act to the camera and be natural. The supporting performances are less good, but having three leads that can actually act in a Pureflix movie is a real “one-eyed man in the land of blind” situation, so I didn’t think this movie was exactly a total turd, which is what I was kind of expecting. It’s also explicitly trying to be a comedy, so it doesn’t have the kind of self-seriousness that really torpedoes a lot of these faith-based movies. Anna’s parents are incredibly over-the-top in terms of being kind, loving, giving, etc when the movie starts and it took me a minute to figure out that the movie was actually kind of poking fun at them and then when they turn “evil,” well, the movie might as well have them both grow mustaches and twirl them. It’s obvious that the movie is just being silly and not trying to do one of those “all atheists are evil” things. As these kinds of movies go, I’d go so far as to call this one harmless. Still, I mean, it isn’t good. I mean, don’t watch it or anything. 1 star.
tl;dr – very silly faith-based film is cheesy and not well-made or written; at least it doesn’t take itself as seriously as most. 1 star.