Away with the Penguins

**Spoilers**

I guess it’s not that I’m not particularly a fan of the actress, Rhiannon Fish, I think it’s more the roles she seems to gravitate to. Or is put in. She does “hapless” really well. I did like her in one movie, but generally I find her acting a little too self conscious and stagey. “Look at me, I’m so quirky and cute.” I’m in the minority, however, in seeing the appeal. I actually just saw her in one of her early roles for Hallmark where she played “the sister”, and she was just fine.

Sometimes in order to get past the first 15 minutes of Hallmark movies, you have to ignore the absurd setups which serve to throw the hero and the heroine together. I have to say the one in this movie was one of the most preposterous ever. One day, Emma (Rhiannon Fish) gets a phone call from her father who is in the Antarctic researching penguins with which he is obsessed. The satellite phone keeps going in and out but Emma hears “Real Problem” “Ice sheet breaking up” “Real Danger” “all alone”, and “Killer Whale”. Combined with the chest pains he has lately been experiencing, concerned Emma concludes her father must be in grave danger and is calling for help. She decides she must hot foot it to the South Pole to rescue him from the killer whale, or avalanche or heart attack. A task she is uniquely qualified for as she is a courtroom artist. It doesn’t occur to her to question why he would call his daughter 1000s of miles away in America instead of the team at the substation a short snowmobile drive away from his outpost. The situation only gets muddier as Emma tells her friend that there was no luck getting through to anyone at the nearby research base, but then informs her that his satellite phone isn’t working and no one’s seen him for weeks. Kind of contradictory. It was noticed, screenwriter. Because I didn’t believe for a second that she did not talk to someone at the base, why didn’t Emma just ask the team at the substation to go check on her Dad and rescue him from whatever kerfuffle he has gotten himself into? As we find out later, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. Because she is kind of a wackadoodle and it turns out the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

She finds out that another research team is catching a cruise ship from Buenos Aires to the base that her Dad drops in on from time to time. To her dismay, she is turned away from boarding the ship since she doesn’t have a ticket or any of the required permits and permissions. Since the Chief Officer turns down both cash and her credit card (because, you know, international law and safety) she decides to sneak on board pretending to be part of the research team. The handsome head of the team, smitten by Rhiannon Fish’s prettiness, puts his whole career on the line, not to mention risking possible arrest, to hide her away and help her.

After all kinds of shipboard high jinks, romantic and otherwise, she finally gets to the substation. She is loaned a snowmobile by head honcho Peggy and goes to her Dad’s Cabin where she finds out her Dad is perfectly fine and that it was all just a big misunderstanding. Turns out it was Lola the penguin’s life which was in danger, not his own. Boy, is his face red! What a crazy guy!

By this time, I was pretty much done. But I had to stick around to the bitter end if only to see if Rhiannon ever puts on a warm hat while tramping around or riding a snowmobile in the minus 50 degree weather. She doesn’t. But she does manage to put on a bathing suit. Rest assured, Lola is saved and reunited with her mate, Hugo, Dad and Peggy become a thing, and Emma moves to the South Pole to continue her romance with Andy the engineer. No one is arrested, and we leave Emma sitting outside in the snow illustrating a Children’s book about Penguins. Still hatless, bless her heart. This movie was filmed in Patagonia and has some nice scenery.