“Christmas with a Prince” isn’t bad, it’s just boring, and that can be a tough pill for a holiday movie to swallow. The 2018 flick is one of those cheesy feel good stories to watch this time of year. It’s set in the pediatric ward of a large hospital, and right there one should be clued in as to what’s going on.
Our heroine is Dr. Tasha Mason, played by the stunningly flawless Kaitlyn Leeb. Dr. Mason is what we would expect from this type of character. She cares so much about her patients she’ll do literally anything for them, including drawing the ire of her budget conscious superiors. Dr. Mason’s brother Jeff (Josh Dean) plays a nurse at the hospital and serves as her closest ally.
I found the brother/sister – one is a doctor the other a nurse but not the traditional way you would expect – dynamic to be pretty good. Leeb and Dean work well off of each other, with the latter taking the comedic role and doing a decent job. And the backdrop of sick children in a hospital gives us enough of an emotional charge that added drama isn’t really required; a good writer could make that scenario work. The addition of a new patient – Prince Alexander (Nick Hounslow) a childhood friend of Jeff’s who treated Tasha poorly so she hates him now is unnecessary. Hounslow looks like he pulled himself off of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad, and is pretty unrelatable to an average Joe like me. I have enough children to deal with
Antagonists come in the form of Dr. Mason’s cost cutting boss (Lanette Ware) who is so over the top with her callousness that the complete about face she does mid-movie comes totally out of nowhere. Of course Prince Alexander already has a beautiful girlfriend (Anastasia Marinina) who of course doesn’t like him connecting with Tasha, and there’s the King of this insignificant fictional country weighing in and…yawn. It’s been done before with far better results.
As I stated, “Christmas with a Prince” isn’t a bad movie. It’s just dry. The setting is great and sweet if you like children. I think keeping the characters as more normal people would have been better.
