A Christmas Prince: Or, Why Netflix Christmas Movies Suck
I'd rather be watching The Prince and Me
A Christmas Prince truly needs no introduction. It was released to great, ironic fanfare in 2017, where it quickly became the hate-watching fluffy favorite for Christmas on Netflix. It spawned many baffled articles, many comparisons to better romantic royalty films (I’ll go into this more below), and one Jenny Nicholson video making a very convincing case that it’s actually a dystopia film.
Having watched it, was it good? No. But more importantly, did I have fun watching it?
Also no.
Let’s get into it.
Writing: garbage. A dumpster filled entirely with rotting food and Christmas dreams. The dialogue is inane, the plot ridiculously contrived. The characters are just bundles of stereotypes wrapped up in castoff prom attire. Everything is communicated through tired shorthand. You know Amber is a quirky girl because she wears her red Converse with everything, even her fancy dress! You know Prince Richard has hidden depths because he plays Christmas carols on the piano! In a room alone! And smiles twice in the whole movie! You know Amber is woke because one of her friends is Black and the other one is gay, and saying that is basically a spoiler because they have no other personality traits!
The one thing I ask of a bad movie is that it at least be entertaining. An over-the-top shitshow is perfectly welcome. Encouraged, even, in a project like this. But this movie is one of the most boring things I’ve ever watched. I had to take two breaks in an 87-minute movie because I could feel my brain matter melting inside my skull. But it wasn’t just the writing that was doing this.
Acting: This is ostensibly a romance film. Two people are featured prominently in the trailer and promotional materials, positioned in such a way as to suggest they will end this movie moony-eyed in a horse-drawn carriage together. But conveying this convincingly requires chemistry. Rose McIver and Ben Lamb do not have that. I was shocked to realize that Rose McIver plays the lead on Ghosts, an actually funny show, so I know she can act. Ben Lamb, however, had only this movie to impress me, and he plays the role like someone whose only preparation for it was watching the 2005 Pride and Prejudice while drunk. The face does. not. MOVE! But then again, it’s hard for even an excellent actor to surmount horrible writing, so I’ll call this one a writeoff for Ben Lamb.
I’d like to award a few acting points to Honor Kneafsey, who plays Richard’s younger sister, Emily. Her character gets an actual personality, which helps; Emily has spina bifida and rebels against being coddled and confined through pranks and sassy remarks. The handling of this storyline is not exactly groundbreaking, and I doubt Emily would immediately warm up to Amber because she called her “brave,” but it’s better depicted than I would have expected.
Set Cuteness:
This set is … better than it could have been! It all depends on if you’re comparing it to a real movie or to a fake made-for-TV one. I think a lot of people compared it to the former when it first came out, but the exterior of the castle they used is gorgeously lit up for Christmas, and even the interior isn’t bad, for an otherwise bad movie. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily cute and Christmassy.
Which brings me to my final criterion.
Christmas Spirit:
Pretty much none.
“But the lights!” you cry. “The village market! The cute diner! The climactic Christmas scene!”
Yes, I know. But Christmas trappings do not true Christmas spirit make! Because the rest of the movie is so farcical, the characters so bland, and the story so completely focused on silly invented inheritance politics in a fictional country, there is no room left for being excited about Christmas. Sure, a baking scene is shoehorned in, in which they don’t seem to actually make much of anything, and there are a couple of parties, but it doesn’t feel genuine. The Christmas angle is barely there and seems intended to sell the movie, and as a lover of Christmas, I will not fa-la-la and fiddle-dee-dee simply to line movie executives’ pockets, thank you very much!
A final note:
This movie takes inspiration from a few 2000s royalty movies, all far better than this one. The Princess Diaries, of course, which A Christmas Prince doesn’t deserve to be within spitting distance of. But this “film” (I am of course using the term loosely) is even closer to another, slightly less famous one: The Prince and Me, a movie from 2004 starring Julia Stiles and Luke Mably.
I watched that movie recently for the first time, and I think it’s been on my mind because in it I saw a hint of the movie A Christmas Prince could have been (or at least approached being) in a different time. The Prince and Me is often silly and over-the-top, but I was shocked at how genuinely compelling it was. The actors are talented and have chemistry. Their characters have interests, personalities, and loved ones they care about. They actually go into the intricacies of governing, and the difficulties that can ensue in a royal-normie romance!
But what struck me most about The Prince and Me was not what was good about it, but that there was any good in it at all. A movie like this made today, one about a fictional prince and a normal girl, wouldn’t be any good. It would be cheap and ridiculous and thrown together, because in the last decade or so the movie industry has murdered mid-budget movies in favor of profit. And when we express a wish for something better, we’re told that these kinds of movies are just like that, and why can’t we just let people enjoy things?
Thanks to the success of A Christmas Prince, Netflix has been pumping out cheesy Christmas garbage ever since, at a rate unmatched by any entity except Hallmark. And hey, I’m the first to say, I actually enjoy some of those movies! I hope to talk about a few of the ones I’ve enjoyed the most later. But in a time when we’re getting inundated with shitty, half-baked, made-for-profit movies from every Hollywood studio, and getting told we can’t expect anything better, can you blame me for being exhausted? Crappy feel-good movies have their place. I just wish there were a few more good ones being made to balance it out.
Overall score: 2/10 Red Converse Sneakers. I gave it an extra point for Emily.