Christmas 2020 Reviews: Day 3 - Christmas Catch (2018)

Mackenzie Bennett is a police detective who is good at her job, but this doesn't seem to matter to anyone in her life, as they are all focused on her severe inability to flirt and maintain a romantic relationship. When Mackenzie falls from a stool while trying to put up a Christmas tree star on the top of the tree at her work one evening, she is literally caught in the big strong arms of Carson. Carson is handsome, charming, and for whatever reason, the only man Mackenzie has ever been able to have an easy-flowing, flirtatious conversation with.

But he's also the suspect in Mackenzie's latest case.

When her superiors find out that Mackenzie and Carson have already met, they push her to date him, as a cover to find out more about his activity, and the valuable diamond reindeer he has stolen. As Mackenzie gets to know Carson, she finds that maybe he isn't such a bad guy after all...

There were two things I liked about this film. Firstly, it's incredibly festive. Not all of the films I'll be looking at this month embrace Christmas as much as this, and I have to say, I enjoyed that aspect.

Secondly, I really enjoyed the chemistry between Emily Alatalo as Mackenzie, and Franco Lo Pesti as Carson. They're given some very cheesy and occasionally unrealistic dialogue (especially in the context of their first meeting). Even though they haven't known each other for very long, you believe in this blossoming relationship, and they were cute enough for me to begin to worry what would happen when Carson inevitably found out Mackenzie's true identity, and how their relationship would be after that.

The rest of the film sadly didn't leave me so impressed. For a start, I feel like this film could have been a thirty or forty-five minute short, instead of the eighty minutes of screen time we got. There wasn't enough substance to it to justify its length, and there were some scenes I would happily cut, such as the awkward, unfunny meeting between Carson, Mackenzie and her friend Ken, as well as all the times when Mackenzie's mother and her friends Ken, Jessica and Reid made excruciating exaggerations about her inability to flirt. I also deeply disliked that damn twist at the end.

The twist was awful. In the last ten minutes of the film, they decided to play up the "cop" aspect of this film (which is already a prominent part of the film) by having a twist reveal about a certain character. This character and their accomplice were horribly acted, and it felt like I was watching a terrible made-for TV crime film, as opposed to the only somewhat bad made-for-TV Christmas film I had liked aspects of previously.

In terms of Carson's relation to the criminal world, I won't spoil it, but I will say that it's a bit disappointing and that I think they played it too safe. If the makers of this film wanted to justify the running time, they should have made Carson more villainous than he was and have him slowly turn his behaviour around for the sake of the woman he liked, which creates more tension for him as a character, and more depth to Mackenzie's choices as a character, as there would be real conflict as to why she has feelings for a bad man. Yet even though he's a suspect in a case, Mackenzie never seems really conflicted about her attraction towards him and consistently likes him. That's a bit worrying for a police officer, but then again, it's 2020. We've seen real police do worse things.

Aside from our lead actress and Andrew Bushell as Reid, none of the acting is particularly great here. Presti is fine, but his character is bland and there isn't much for him to work with, so it almost feels hard to judge his acting skills. As I said before, the main villain and their accomplice are the worst (the accomplice has a particularly awful scene with Carson and Mackenzie in the café Ken owns, and has no reaction at all when there is a threat of them being shot at one point). Mackenzie's mother is not the worst, but she isn't great. She's clearly trying, but it feels unnatural. I don't think this is all on her though, as her character is a bit unintentionally awkward, and is made unlikeable by how harsh she is to Mackenzie for a lot of her scenes.

This is spoiled at the start of the film, so I don't think I'm ruining anything for anyone when I say that at the beginning of the film, Mackenzie's mother is revealed to also be her superior at work. To clarify, Mackenzie's mother is supposed to be powerful enough to be a police captain, yet she belittles Mackenzie for being unmarried and bad with men all the time.

Seems healthy.

The plot is so thin that instead of using their time to build up good characters to make up for that, they have all of the characters make fun of Mackenzie's inability to flirt.

Because as we all know, belittling someone for being bad at something is a guaranteed way to make them better at it.

At one point, they even have Mackenzie attempt to flirt, and play romantic music, but then play a record scratch sound effect when it goes wrong. A record scratch sound effect. In 2018.

Come on, that's such a 2000s joke, and it wasn't funny then. The only time I can think of that working ever was in Bo Burnham's Make Happy, and it wasn't even one of his best bits in that show.

The music in this film wasn't good either, it sounded very generic and cheap, like stock music.

Overall, despite a romance with good chemistry and a whole lot of Christmas, this film isn't good. It just felt very low quality, particularly in terms of writing, and some things were so dumb that it damaged the experience for me. If made-for-television crime films are your secret guilty pleasure, maybe you'll enjoy this, but for me, I was unfortunately unsatisfied.

THE SCOREBOARD

Would I recommend this film? No

Christmas quote of the film: "Are you Christmas? 'Cause I want to Merry you." - Jessica

Film rating: 2/10