A ‘90s Christmas
Can we all stop pretending we remember the 90s?
Hallmark has gotten weird this Christmas Countdown season, and the weirdness continues with A ‘90s Christmas.
The film starts out with one of my personal favorite tropes; big-city-business-woman who hates Christmas, but loves work. It is with this trope that Hallmark got a godless, child of sin like me to watch their Christmas movies in the first place.
There is a better chance that I, a born-and-raised New Yorker, marry into a royal family, or meet Santa Claus himself, than there is that I move to a rural area and discover the small-town charms of “real” America. Where I come from (Manhattan) that would be considered more of a fairy tale than any kind of Christmas Magic.
And so, after it was pointed out twice in the first 5 minutes that our leading lady “used to be so close” to someone before she let the law firm take over her life, I thought I would love A ‘90s Christmas. But instead of traveling to a cozy winter village to learn the true meaning of the holiday from the Brawny Paper Towel Man, she travels back in time, to the year 1999.
How does she do this, you might be wondering, well I’ll tell you. After making partner at her law firm, Lucy (played by an actress we’re supposed to believe is 44… and if she is, I want her doctor’s number) eats a sad little meal, alone, at a tacky theme diner. It is there that Lucy RANDOMLY runs into her high school crush, Matt, who lectures her about how they “used to be so close”.
Matt leaves, and an incredibly rude and pushy waitress sits down across from Lucy to question her life choices. Having had enough of that, Lucy calls an Uber to head home. But here’s where things get weird; the Uber pulls up and it’s a 1960s collector car with a European steering wheel. As if that wasn’t enough to give Lucy pause, the driver of the Uber is the pushy waitress from the diner who she just walked out on.
Despite these numerous red flags, Lucy gets into the “Uber” and proceeds to make a mistake no woman in their right mind would ever make when using a ride-share app – she falls asleep.
Eventually the driver-waitress wakes Lucy to tell her they’ve arrived. Lucy gets out of the car (leaving her purse and wallet) and realizes the driver-waitress didn’t take her to her apartment, but rather to her childhood home.
Without a moment of pause to consider how this random stranger knew the address of the home she grew up in, Lucy attempts to get back into the car with this psychopath, so she can drive her back to Chicago to her current residence.
I’m sorry, I do consider myself a feminist, but with Lucy’s level of self-preservation skills, I really wouldn’t feel sorry for her if she were kidnapped and dismembered.
But this is Hallmark, so of course she wasn’t. Instead, this magical driver-waitress drove Lucy to 1999, the first Christmas her family had after her father died.
Lucy is not sure what she’s doing back in 1999 but she sets about trying to figure that out so she can get back to 2024. At first, she thinks she needs to change things order to make things better for her and her loved ones’ futures, but the driver-waitress pops up to tell her she can’t change anything or it will affect her entire life.
Everything that happens from here on in this film is so boring, so I’m just going to zip us right through to the end – Lucy eventually decides not to heed the warnings of the driver-waitress and goes forth to help everyone in her past.
She helps her sad-lesbian sister (a new Hallmark trope?) come out to their mother. She tells her best friend to invest in Apple stock. And she encourages Matt (the high school crush from the diner) to stick with his dreams of pursuing acting (personally, I think acting is an embarrassing career path for a man. If it were up to me, we’d have a reverse Shakespearean situation where all roles were played by women).
All of Lucy’s meddling does change the future, but it pays off for Lucy. She’s able to marry the pathetic actor man, her sister gets married to some random woman (which we’re supposed to believe is because she came out two years earlier than she did in the original timeline), and Lucy’s best friend is rich thanks to the invention of the iPhone and some untraceable insider trading.
Now obviously we have seen a million movies like this, but here’s what really eats at me – unlike in 13 Going on 30, when Lucy returns to the new and improved 2024, she has seen everything that happened between then and 1999, but she didn’t experience it. And she still remembers the alternate timeline. This means she’s living a life that was actually lived by a wholly different Lucy than the Lucy she is (kind of an Us situation, if you think about it). And while most watching this movie probably don’t spend too much time worrying about the minutia of time travel, or the ramifications of “returning” to an alternate timeline, it has been driving me fucking batshit since I had the displeasure of watching A ‘90s Christmas.
Also there was barely any 90s nostalgia which felt like a huge missed opportunity. Hella lame.
Overall I give A ‘90s Christmas 2 out of 10 candy canes.
At least Lucy’s mom didn’t try to fuck her.