The Christmas Blessing (2005)

Review Date 3/29/2018When a Doctor Nathan (Neil Patrick Harris),, loses a patient , he decides that being a doctor isn't meant for him, and he wants to give it up. He decides to take a vacation to his hometown, and stay with his father (Hugh Thompson).To tell you more would be wrong. However this film is sad but is also a lesson about life and how we deal with "Bad Things" and realizing your own mortality and how you want to live your life.

This film is a strange beast as it's better than the original first film. If you enjoyed the Christmas Shoes then you should enjoy this festive tale.Beware though, you will need a box of tissues for the ending: This is a heartwarming tearjerker which does just as it says. Even though the clichés are throughout the story; but then again isn't that just the case in Christmas films(?); I found myself reacting to the characters situations. It's the acting and direction that work the tears free from your eyes.I really liked the idea of "The Christmas Shoes" journey through the film. It is a little cheesy, but the world is a small place, and things like this can, and do, happen.Well worth watching on a cold winter's night, while cuddled up under a blanket, by a fire.

We don't expect greatness from a TV movie. We understand it will have a predictable plot, lame dialog and low production values. And The Christmas Blessing does indeed have all those defects, but it also has problems that are far more profound. The Christmas Blessing repeatedly pushes away its audience by being internally inconsistent, eye-rollingly unbelievable and amateurish. My wife and I were in the mood to like this movie, but its flaws were so great that we didn't enjoy it.The first flaw is Casting! Neil Patrick Harris plays a surgeon who has returned home. Given that he is a surgeon, he must be in his 30s (or older), yet his Dad is played by Hugh Thompson, who also appears to be in his 30's (and who, by the way, looks nothing like Neil Patrick Harris.) "Father and Son" look so clearly to be about the same age that my wife and I kept shaking our heads in disbelief every time they were shown together.And another major character, a 10-year old boy, has a father who is played by Shaun Johnson, who looks in this film to be in his mid-50s. The casting of these two father/son combinations is so incongruous -so ridiculous - that it destroys any "suspension of disbelief" that a sympathetic audience might have.The second major flaw is the story-telling. We meet a 10-year-old boy, played by Angus Jones, who is depicted as a lonely but normal boy who is good at basketball. Later in the movie, we learn (in totally unconvincing medical scenes) that he has been long diagnosed with a severe cardiac condition that will likely be fatal. Wow, that's a surprise, completely inconsistent with how the boy has been depicted Remarkably, the female lead character has a similar issue. We have followed this female character for the entire film -she jogs constantly and has appeared to be healthy - and she has been dating the surgeon character. In the film's last 20 minutes, she suddenly faints. The healthy lady jogger and her surgeon boyfriend discover that she has an undiagnosed liver condition that requires constant hospitalization and is untreatable and terminal. Her surgeon boy-friend never noticed anything -no jaundice, no symptoms - no signs at all of illness. But we are now asked to believe that, out of the blue, she is dieing and her only hope is a liver transplant.What lazy story-telling! What ever this TV movie was intended to be, it ultimately comes across as nothing more than a shallow attempt to manipulate the emotions of its viewers.Lastly, The Christmas Blessing depicts the medical profession and illness in a completely unrealistic way. For example, shortly after her life-saving liver transplant, the patient is visited by her boyfriend at her hospital bed - and she is shown as being completely recovered from her transplant. There is no pain, no weakness, no fatigue and no IV tubes! She is seemingly ready to go jogging in a day or two, as if she had received a pedicure rather than a liver transplant. It is mind-boggling - the kind of lapse you might forgive in a grade school play but not in a TV movie.Yucch, The Christmas Blessing is a real clunker of a film - it is really bad even as measured against the low standards of Hallmark/Lifetime movies. Stay away!

While the movie told a nice enough, and romantic enough, story about love, family and moving on, they could have done a lot better job with some of the details. For example, if Meghan were really that sick with liver disease, wouldn't she have shown signs of jaundice by the time she collapsed? And therefore wouldn't Nathan, as a doctor, have seen that easily? Especially since he was staring into her eyes all the time.And if Charlie was sick for that long with a heart issue, wouldn't his father have kept him out of strenuous sporting activity? I know he had issues about his wife leaving him and then dying, but he obviously cared deeply for his son. If, as Charlie said, he had seen "a thousand" doctors then this would have been well known. Just sloppy writing.