We don't expect greatness from a TV movie. We understand it will have a predictable plot, lame dialog and low production values. And The Christmas Blessing does indeed have all those defects, but it also has problems that are far more profound. The Christmas Blessing repeatedly pushes away its audience by being internally inconsistent, eye-rollingly unbelievable and amateurish. My wife and I were in the mood to like this movie, but its flaws were so great that we didn't enjoy it.
The first flaw is Casting! Neil Patrick Harris plays a surgeon who has returned home. Given that he is a surgeon, he must be in his 30s (or older), yet his Dad is played by Hugh Thompson, who also appears to be in his 30's (and who, by the way, looks nothing like Neil Patrick Harris.) "Father and Son" look so clearly to be about the same age that my wife and I kept shaking our heads in disbelief every time they were shown together.
And another major character, a 10-year old boy, has a father who is played by Shaun Johnson, who looks in this film to be in his mid-50s. The casting of these two father/son combinations is so incongruous -so ridiculous - that it destroys any "suspension of disbelief" that a sympathetic audience might have.
The second major flaw is the story-telling. We meet a 10-year-old boy, played by Angus Jones, who is depicted as a lonely but normal boy who is good at basketball. Later in the movie, we learn (in totally unconvincing medical scenes) that he has been long diagnosed with a severe cardiac condition that will likely be fatal. Wow, that's a surprise, completely inconsistent with how the boy has been depicted Remarkably, the female lead character has a similar issue. We have followed this female character for the entire film -she jogs constantly and has appeared to be healthy - and she has been dating the surgeon character. In the film's last 20 minutes, she suddenly faints. The healthy lady jogger and her surgeon boyfriend discover that she has an undiagnosed liver condition that requires constant hospitalization and is untreatable and terminal. Her surgeon boy-friend never noticed anything -no jaundice, no symptoms - no signs at all of illness. But we are now asked to believe that, out of the blue, she is dieing and her only hope is a liver transplant.
What lazy story-telling! What ever this TV movie was intended to be, it ultimately comes across as nothing more than a shallow attempt to manipulate the emotions of its viewers.
Lastly, The Christmas Blessing depicts the medical profession and illness in a completely unrealistic way. For example, shortly after her life-saving liver transplant, the patient is visited by her boyfriend at her hospital bed - and she is shown as being completely recovered from her transplant. There is no pain, no weakness, no fatigue and no IV tubes! She is seemingly ready to go jogging in a day or two, as if she had received a pedicure rather than a liver transplant. It is mind-boggling - the kind of lapse you might forgive in a grade school play but not in a TV movie.
Yucch, The Christmas Blessing is a real clunker of a film - it is really bad even as measured against the low standards of Hallmark/Lifetime movies. Stay away!
The first flaw is Casting! Neil Patrick Harris plays a surgeon who has returned home. Given that he is a surgeon, he must be in his 30s (or older), yet his Dad is played by Hugh Thompson, who also appears to be in his 30's (and who, by the way, looks nothing like Neil Patrick Harris.) "Father and Son" look so clearly to be about the same age that my wife and I kept shaking our heads in disbelief every time they were shown together.
And another major character, a 10-year old boy, has a father who is played by Shaun Johnson, who looks in this film to be in his mid-50s. The casting of these two father/son combinations is so incongruous -so ridiculous - that it destroys any "suspension of disbelief" that a sympathetic audience might have.
The second major flaw is the story-telling. We meet a 10-year-old boy, played by Angus Jones, who is depicted as a lonely but normal boy who is good at basketball. Later in the movie, we learn (in totally unconvincing medical scenes) that he has been long diagnosed with a severe cardiac condition that will likely be fatal. Wow, that's a surprise, completely inconsistent with how the boy has been depicted Remarkably, the female lead character has a similar issue. We have followed this female character for the entire film -she jogs constantly and has appeared to be healthy - and she has been dating the surgeon character. In the film's last 20 minutes, she suddenly faints. The healthy lady jogger and her surgeon boyfriend discover that she has an undiagnosed liver condition that requires constant hospitalization and is untreatable and terminal. Her surgeon boy-friend never noticed anything -no jaundice, no symptoms - no signs at all of illness. But we are now asked to believe that, out of the blue, she is dieing and her only hope is a liver transplant.
What lazy story-telling! What ever this TV movie was intended to be, it ultimately comes across as nothing more than a shallow attempt to manipulate the emotions of its viewers.
Lastly, The Christmas Blessing depicts the medical profession and illness in a completely unrealistic way. For example, shortly after her life-saving liver transplant, the patient is visited by her boyfriend at her hospital bed - and she is shown as being completely recovered from her transplant. There is no pain, no weakness, no fatigue and no IV tubes! She is seemingly ready to go jogging in a day or two, as if she had received a pedicure rather than a liver transplant. It is mind-boggling - the kind of lapse you might forgive in a grade school play but not in a TV movie.
Yucch, The Christmas Blessing is a real clunker of a film - it is really bad even as measured against the low standards of Hallmark/Lifetime movies. Stay away!