Holiday movies are an entire industry unto themselves. Some networks devote months of output to rom-coms set during Christmas, and I’m not complaining! They are often warm and comforting to watch. Maybe that’s why so many streamers, like the Roku Channel, are getting into the genre. Roku’s latest release is Jingle Bell Love and it is exactly what you expect it to be, in both good and bad ways.
If you were a kid in the late 1980’s like me, then Jingle Bell Love should particularly interest you. New Kids on the Block member Joey McIntyre plays Jack Cooper. (He was my favorite member of the group!) Jack is in real estate with an adorable 10-year-old daughter, Grace (Delia Lisette Chambers). He is also a recent widower, and he decides to take his daughter to his wife’s hometown for their first Christmas without her. Jack has started dating someone, a woman named Veronica (Brittany Drisdelle), who he works with. Veronica sees the chance to snap up a business in the town Jack will be traveling to, so she gives him work to do over the holidays. (And Grace doesn’t like her, either, so those two things tell us everything we need to know.) The owner of the business, Jessica (Michelle Morgan), presents a whole new complication.
Jingle Bell Love is utterly predictable and yet it is also sweet and unobjectionable. If all you want is a holiday romance to pass the time, then this film will fit the bill.
“Maybe you could conjure up a Christmas miracle.”
Thanks to Hallmark Channel, Netflix, Lifetime, and many other outlets, we’re used to this story. We know that when Grace asks Santa to find her dad a girlfriend for Christmas, that’s exactly how this movie will end, don’t we? And when Jessica talks to the bank and finds out she has until Christmas Eve to pay them $25000 dollars, we know how that will end, too. Pushing the boundaries of storytelling is not the point of these films. The point is low-stakes conflicts that will have a happy ending, and, this time of year, with festive atmosphere sprinkled on top. Jingle Bell Love provides that.
Granted, with no ambition to anything more special, a film like this can end up being a bit bland. There isn’t a whole lot of distinctive personality to the characters. It falls on the actors to do what they can. Thankfully, they all have some appeal. McIntyre is competent enough, though he’s not asked to do any heavy emoting in this role. However, he does get a couple of cute moments, and there is one look of love that he carries off well. Besides that, hearing him sing is always time well spent. You don’t cast a boy band member and then not have him sing! Morgan also sings here, and she is talented as well. She and McIntyre only have a little chemistry together but it is watchable. Of the supporting cast, Kenny Wong as Jessica’s co-worker and friend Ivan is the most entertaining.
“You brought music back into my life.”
I think the most glaring flaw with the writing in this film is that you question the decisions of the lead characters more than you should. We keep waiting for Jack to tell Jessica that he works for the developer who wants to buy her business. Sure, it’s not easy because the cafe was her late mother’s but it’s less complicated than what Jack does decide to do. He convinces Jessica to plan a fundraising concert in a couple of days. We also wonder why Jessica leaves the concert when she finds out the truth. I’d be angry too, but you might as well finish if you’re in the middle of it. Just because a story doesn’t have high stakes doesn’t mean logic has to suffer.
Other than that, though, this Christmas romance is comforting, especially thanks to the music. If there’s anything that goes hand-in-hand with the holidays more than romance, it’s music. Jack is a songwriter; he just works in real estate to pay the bills. That means McIntyre gets to sing an original song written for the film. It’s called “A Brand New Christmas” and it’s quite good. It has a melancholy touch to it but the melody is strong. It’s a pleasant piece of holiday fun, and this film could be described the same way. Jingle Bell Love doesn’t ask a lot of time or effort from the audience. There are a lot of similar options out there but you won’t regret watching this one once.
3 stars out of 5
Jingle Bell Love is streaming on the Roku Channel.
I actually liked Michelle singing in the movie better than the record version Joey did with different singer who I thought tried to Jazz up a song that was more a love song & Michelle sang it that way. And I thought the chemistry was fine as this was not romance that developed over even a few months .But ina period of Like 2 weeks. That would fall to writers Michelle is a very very talented actress and had great chemistry on Heartland with 3 different actors as script was written . yvonne.blackwell444@gmail.com. Yvonne Blackwell