Summary
Christmas Wedding Planner is an uplifting seasonal reminder that even the most implausibly beautiful people can be utterly talentless just like you.
One of the advantages of being a senior editor is that I often get to make volunteers spend ninety minutes watching something I know they’re going to hate. Unfortunately that isn’t always a viable approach, and in times of strife it sometimes falls to me to wade into the trenches and get my own hands covered in seasonal slop like Christmas Wedding Planner, which arrived on Netflix today.
As far as I’m aware Christmas Wedding Planner was made for TV, arrived there last year, and was rightly ignored by everyone. Yet ‘tis the season for Netflix to stuff their stockings full of cheap tat for the extended family, so here we are.
The titular wedding planner is Kelsey (Jocelyn Hudon), an extremely good-looking and admittedly very charming young lady who is organising the holy union of her extremely good-looking cousin Emily (Rebecca Dalton) and her extremely good-looking but quite obvious lecherous fiancé Todd (Eric Hicks). Things are going rather smoothly until the arrival of Connor (Stephen Huszar), an extremely good-looking private investigator (and Emily’s ex!) who has been hired by a mysterious source to determine if Todd is up to no good.
This is one of those movies which superimpose text messages on-screen to let everyone know it’s hip and modern, but it’s also the kind of movie in which those messages don’t entirely fit in the frame so half the text is missing. Kelsey is really lovely and I wish she was in a better film, but she also acts to her own internal monologue like someone else is speaking the words to her, so I can’t help but hate her and wish her misery.
That’s unfortunate, because Christmas Wedding Planner doesn’t traffic in misery, no matter how impossibly it has to contort itself in order to contrive a wonderfully happy ending after Connor predictably wins Kelsey’s sweet and innocent heart. It isn’t a spoiler to say that happens – this is, after all, a made-for-TV Christmas movie – but the exact circumstances are so insultingly stupid that I’ll leave you to discover them on your own.
There are, apparently, people who like these things, and if you’re one of those people you have my condolences. I also wouldn’t want to put you off Christmas Wedding Planner unnecessarily. Perhaps consult a more trusted source for a proper verdict, and if the mystery of Todd’s potential infidelity is riveting enough for you to spend 90 minutes of your life unravelling it, more power to you. Me? I hope Kelsey and Connor don’t last.
