All About Christmas Eve (2012) Movie Review

All About Christmas Eve (2012)   3/53/53/53/53/5


Haylie Duff in All About Christmas Eve (2012)

The Parallel Lives of Eve

Eve (Haylie Duff - Naughty & Nice) had once been an art major, making ends meet waitressing when she was spotted by Elizabeth Cole (Connie Sellecca - A Holiday to Remember), the owner of a huge party planning company who offers her a job. Now several years later and Eve's doing well as a party planner despite Elizabeth's ways of putting her down. With Christmas coming Eve is due to be going to Vermont with her slacker boyfriend, Darren (Stephen Colletti - Status: Unknown), except the handsome Aidan (Chris Carmack - A Christmas Wedding Date) wants a party organized at his place in L.A. and Eve has to do it. On the day she is supposed to fly to L.A. she over sleeps and her future will rest on a matter of seconds and whether she makes it on to the plane or not.

As I started to watch "All About Christmas Eve" I thought here we go again with another on the dumb side Christmas comedy as we meet Eve running a Christmas themed Bar Mitzvah with Connie Sellecca over doing the tough boss and by doing so coming close to being a pantomime character. But then the writers come back with a concept from the tail end of the 20th century as they give us a take on "Sliding Doors". For those who haven't seen "Sliding Doors" we encounter the life of someone but shown as a parallel as in what happens, in this case, if Eve catches the plane and also at the same time if she didn't with of course the eternal question being in the long run does it matter as we all get to the same point no matter what happens.

It has to be said that whilst not original and really only a double whammy of the "What If" scenario the fact that "All About Christmas Eve" wasn't as completely dumb as I had expected was a pleasant surprise and was enough to keep my attention. Having said that there is still plenty of the dumb stuff, scratch that, cutesy, romantic dumb stuff that whilst it features a more enjoyable parallel set up you still get the hair flicking, the comedy dialogue and in each story the typical elements you would normally get in made for TV movies.

Now I already mentioned Connie Sellecca's almost pantomime performance and to put it simply she was wrong for the role. Sellecca is not the only one as Patrick Muldoon resorts to going over the top as well which whilst some times making a scene is not always ideal. But the biggest wrong for me is that yet again "All About Christmas Eve" is another so called Christmas movie which isn't about the season of joy and giving; only using it as a back drop for things. As such we get a few nicely decorated Christmas trees here and there but no real Christmas vibe.

What this all boils down to is that "All About Christmas Eve" was enjoyable purely because it uses a fun basic idea which hasn't been over used in other movies. But at the same time it is a flawed movie with it once again being a Christmas movie which ends up not really about Christmas.

Tags: TV Christmas Movies, Christmas Movies


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