Summary
Netflix film Holiday In The Wild is a soppy, robotic TV romance movie that would have been best served on Hallmark, which I am sure the romantics will like.
Netflix film Holiday In The Wild starts worryingly choppy, introducing us to Kate (Kristin Davis) forcing family photos on her husband and her son, who looks weirdly too old to be a college student. The sound feels a little off, the acting feels out of place and I was wondering if I was going to survive the first act. Kate’s world turns upside down when her husband casually divorces her on the spot, with the couple both acting like they haven’t spent a lifetime together raising a child. The opening scenes are incredulously robotic, with the cast acting like they’ve just met each other and there wasn’t time for auditions.
Eventually, the story turns into a half-suggestive romance, whereby Kate ends up going to her “second honeymoon” by visiting an African safari where she meets an elephant conservationist, played by Rob Lowe, who I am convinced is trying extremely hard to be Brad Pitt’s doppelganger — it may be Pitt’s Oscar year after all. May as well grab the limelight while he can.
Holiday In The Wild is astoundingly cheesy — it’s melted cheese on melted cheese — and at one point I felt like it was going to bubble and creep all over my body, like some bad horror movie, drowning me in that nastiness they serve with nachos in the cinema. Even the story arc that leads to Kate becoming highly interested in the elephant sanctuary is cheesy — throwing her entire life for the love of elephants, with on-the-surface enthusiasm to keep the audience convinced that the story well and truly bought by the production crew. At one point, Rob Lowe’s character Derek tries to make a salient point about how humans are the most dangerous influence to nature — but it was a well-timed, cringy answer.
Underlying Kate’s dedication to elephants is a romance somewhere, with the chemistry nowhere to be seen but the story tells us that Kate and Derek like each other. Holiday In The Wild has all the ingredients for a Hallmark TV movie, but this time it was Netflix’s turn to take the bottom of the barrel and bid for the work. Holiday In The Wild is a dud, but I’m sure romantics out there will enjoy this Netflix film with a glass of wine and a “share bag” of chocolates, which no-one ever shares.
