Christmas 2020 Reviews: Day 4 - A Gingerbread Romance (2018)

It's looking like a white Christmas, and yes, I do mean that Christmas films are prominently made for white people, by white people, starring white people. Considering the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement this year, I felt it was important to try and find films starring people of colour for these 25 Christmas reviews I'm doing this year. Shockingly, but unsurprisingly, I only found a handful. There are few films where both leads are people of colour, while there are more where one person in the main romance is white, while the other the other is a person of colour. This is one of the few to have two people of colour: an African-American male lead, and a mixed race female lead.

A Gingerbread Christmas follows Taylor (played by Tia Mowry) an architect who has been tasked with making a life-size gingerbread house as part of a charity competition, in order to get the promotion she wants. When she teams up with baker Adam (Duane Henry) the pair clash at first, both wanting to lead the project. But once they involve Adam's young daughter Brooke (played by Meloday Niemann) the three find that they are a great team, both when working on the house, and when sharing the joys of Christmas with each other.

This film was one of the most boring films I have ever seen. The acting was so bad that if the performances were any flatter, you could slide them under a door. The two leads had no chemistry together - not the romantic kind, or even the vague sense that they actually liked each other. For the whole hour and twenty minutes, I was very aware of the fact that I was watching actors saying lines, instead of feeling like I was watching characters who were playing out their stories in a realistic way. None of these actors even feel like they're acting off of each other, it's like the cameramen filmed one person saying their lines, called cut, filmed the next person, called cut again, and then went back to the first person to respond to them. These were some of the most unnatural line readings I have ever heard.

The plot is also very dumb. A woman has to make a life-sized gingerbread house that will win a charity competition so that she can get a promotion at work and move to Paris? How does a company come up with that as a rule of thumb for promoting their employees?

I didn't care about the characters, and so I didn't care about Taylor achieving this. It just felt incredibly shallow, and despite their attempts to shove Christmas activities like ice skating or decorating a tree down your throat, I did not feel festive after watching this at all. The motivation Taylor had felt so shallow and underdeveloped, it all felt empty.

This film isn't quite worthy of a one star rating, but it's very close. Its saving graces are that the final gingerbread house does look great, as do all the baked goods we're shown. Additionally, it's nice that the leads are people of colour who are able to just be living their lives without race being a conscious issue. But in a way, that's part of the films downfall. You could have made these characters white and nothing would have changed. In fact, to be honest, these felt more like stereotypical middle-class, whiny, white characters being played by black people for the sake of diversity. We need better than that. Please, for once Hallmark, make something with some substance, and get good actors to play it out for us.

THE SCOREBOARD

Would I recommend this film? No.

Christmas quote of the film: "For the first time in a while, I feel like I'm home for Christmas." - Taylor

Film rating: 2/10