We’ve made it known time and time again that we love Robert Buckley and Lacey Chabert. We’ve also made it known that we love Hallmark movies. You put all three of them together and you’d think that formula would be a movie that we love. An Unexpected Valentine sounds like a for sure movie that we’d love.
And yet here we are, feeling indifferent about a movie that was meant to kick a season of love, known to all Hallmark fans as Loveuary.
Maybe we’re indifferent because we (like everyone) had the longest January known in history. Maybe that is true. But here we are and we’ve taken a moment to rewatch the movie to make sure if minds could be changed. The truth is we stand with the same thoughts on the movie.
We’re indifferent.
No, we didn’t hate it. No, we didn’t love it.
The truth is it was just cute.
Robert Buckley and Lacey Chabert star in the movie, which after, “A chance encounter on Valentine’s Day brings Hannah and Finn together as they race through New York City to return a lost engagement ring and save one couple’s special day.”
Hannah and Finn are their characters. They are good characters, which we like. They just aren’t the greatest written characters.
There is a question that we must ask. Does Chabert just love playing characters that have something to do with chocolate? We know it’s a small detail, but it is something that continues to draw us out of movies that she is in because it does consistently feel a repeat of the same character. Valentine’s Day is more than chocolate and we do wish that was something that was recognized.
Set in New York, Hannah creates chocolate flavor profiles. She is really great at her job and everyone loves her. That night she’s asked to be at a part of a party her company has. Hannah agrees to attend but needs to go home first.
Finn is a photographer with his first gallery show for his new collection. The gallery owner asks if he can please attend as potential buyers want to meet the artists and pick their brains about their art.
The two meet when Hannah orders a ride share and Finn is the one that picks her up. Hannah ends up in the very back, but after getting a little car sick is moved up front to sit next to Finn. When she goes to look for her phone, the two have to pull over and she heads to the back to look for it.
And that’s when she also finds a box with an engagement ring.
It being Valentine’s Day and Hannah being a romantic, she’d like to find the person who lost the ring. Finn thinks that turning it into lost and found is a good enough thing to do, however, she talks him into trying to find the owner of the ring.
The movie is about the road that the two take to try and figure out who lost the ring. It’s also a little scary that a ride-share driver would know how to find all of the people that they dropped off that day.
What gets us through the next hour or so is that Robert Buckley and Lacey Chabert do have onscreen chemistry. Granted that chemistry is one of friendship and as a viewer one is waiting for that friendship to turn into the kinds that you can imagine these two together.
Somehow in a night of watching the two drive around Manhattan to every person who has been in his car that day, that chemistry does turn a bit. As a view,r you start to believe that these two could build a relationship over time.
Cheesy lines about feelings being heightened or whatever because you spend time in a car with someone, made us cringe a little. However, the adventures that the two went on throughout the night made them fun to watch. It wasn’t the time in the car, but rather the time that the two spent trying to make sure someone had a great Valentine’s Day that spoke to us.
There isn’t a Hallmark movie that Chabert has been in that she’s not great in. However, that being said – we’d love (in addition to the chocolate angle) if she wasn’t put in the same dress with the same hairstyle every single time. Let Chabert’s characters be different – we assure you that she can pull that off.
Buckley’s charm, likewise, is something that makes him great in every role. He’s able to make you fall in love with every character he plays.
The two together make you laugh, smile, sometimes cringe, and overall have a good time. They are what made the movie – a movie worth watching.
The issue with An Unexpected Valentine is the movie’s writing. Some parts just fell flat when they were making every attempt to make them funny. Some parts were too exaggerated. We felt the attempt to make this a romantic comedy. It’s just the romance fell short and the comedy was meh.
Not a movie we’d run to watch again, but not a movie we’d run from either. As we said, we’re “meh” on it.
