Lucky Christmas (2011)

Lucky Christmas has a few issues at its core, and they have nothing to do with the fact that the bachelor who is thrown in the single mom's life is handsome or that boy kisses girl right before the end credits. This is a holiday TV movie and I believe a fair share of the viewing public understands the requirements of the genre. What we don't (or should not) tolerate is a sloppy and irritating ride to the big kiss.Lucky Christmas is the story of a single mom (Elizabeth Berkley) who wins the lottery but gets her car (in which she left the ticket) stolen by the first major problem of the movie: the handsome bachelor's friend. That character has nothing to do in the movie and the more we see how handsome is developed, the less we understand the friendship which looks more like a plot device.The second issue is handsome himself. There is something unsettling about his dreams and aspirations (as well as the kind of personality that would be associated with them) when seen within the context of his family. None of that seems to mesh well together. Not to mention who he hangs out with and how he chooses to deliver the ticket. We are well familiar with irritating romantic comedy ploys, so the ticket wandering around, in and out the house, is not surprising, but mailing it? Really? The movie seemed to be too determined to mess things up, creating a very inconsistent male lead character in the process.The last issue, and the most damning, is how the single mom (who is despite that the most appealing of the bunch) ties forgiveness to finding the ticket and then professes that she doesn't really care about the money. There's something wrong in there somewhere, which makes the character appear more materialistic than she should have for the story to work.

The run up to Christmas is the one time of year I am prepared to watch predictable and cheesy films. This film is just about as predictable as it gets, you know what is coming from the first minute and you aren't proved wrong. Sometimes however you really do just want to watch something undemanding and this fits the bill. What makes this an above average TV Movie is the cast. It suddenly clicked halfway through that Elizabeth Berkeley is the 'star' of the infamous 'Showgirls'- but she is OK in this movie. The real star however is Jason Gray-Stanford who I thought excellent in this. I watched this film with my wife and kids and we all enjoyed it so I recommend it to those who know what to expect.

Elizabeth Berkley is once again the freshest thing in an otherwise stale movie, this one made-for-TV. Sorry yuletide concoction attempts to equate car theft, a lottery win, ice hockey and last-chance boy-girl romance with the holiday spirit. Financially-strapped single mom (whose husband disappeared somewhat mysteriously before the story begins) has her car stolen with a special "Christmas lottery ticket" in the glove compartment. Of course the ticket is a winner--worth an underachieving one million dollars--and of course the guy involved in the car-nabbing is a handsome bachelor with a soft spot for struggling moms and their offspring. Berkley actually manages to make her scenes tender and believable, however the rest of this Hallmark Channel presentation is rather bedraggled.

About ten minutes into this Hallmark Christmas movie, I was thinking that this was going to a variation on Rene Clair's 1931 movie, LE MILLION, in which a poor man in a Paris tenement wins the big lottery -- and loses the ticket. Alas, despite some good acting, particularly from Jason Gray-Stanford, best known for his role as the klutzy police detective in the MONK TV series and good work by Elizabeth Berkley as the chef who could really use the million-dollar lottery ticket, this is a rather straightforward story without much in the way of jokes .... a comedy if not a farce. In addition, the problems that hang over the movie for almost its entire length serve not to make it suspenseful -- will he figure out how to get that ticket back to her without blowing his chances? -- but mildly depressing.Still, the story is a good one, the actors are very good and if the direction makes me think that the point is the money, rather than the people.... well, maybe it is.