Coal-Worthy

It’s not that I didn’t understand this movie, it’s that so many little things did not make sense. And it was boring. I really had high hopes for it. The premise was cute and different, and it starred two of Hallmark’s biggest and most popular stars: Lacey Chabert and Andrew Walker. I would have thought they would have given them a better script. And I don’t know much about direction, I just know when it’s good, but things were said or implied that I didn’t see on screen. Then at the end, the plot just went off into La-La Land, and by that I don’t mean Los Angeles.

In a nut shell, here is the plot. The naughty or nice list is real. But Santa’s elves have long since been relieved of the huge responsibility of deciding whether the children of the world get presents or coal in their stockings. That  job has been sourced to Naughty or Nice, Inc. who uses modern technology and algorithms to separate the good, the bad, and the in-between. They have a huge fancy office building in a big city so the whole company and its mission is right out there on Front Street. The algorithm is adequate for most kids, but some kids are on the line between naughty and nice. And that is where the human inspectors come in. Isabel (Chabert) is one of the best and up for a big promotion. The inspectors are dispersed throughout the Santa Claus believing world assigned to take a closer in-person look at the actions and behavior of these fence-straddling kids. They are armed with a huge guide book detailing, among other things, the rules of engagement in order to make the final determination of coal or presents for Christmas. And no one knows the rule book better or follows it more closely than Isabel. Sounds cute, right? And I am the last person to turn my nose up at a little whimsey. The production values were good, there were some clever and cute lines and concepts, and Lacey Chabert and Andrew Walker are always competent at the very least. But it ended up in a muddle that could have been done much better. And easily fixed.

The first case has Isabel scrutinizing two little boys playing with a ball. One dares the other to throw the ball as high as he can and when he does it breaks a car tail light when it lands (somehow?). It was just an accident, but the one kid runs away and the other struggles with his conscience and then runs away. Lacey writes down “Mischief, Destruction, and Evasion”. Both the boys are judged “Naughty.” Case Closed. No presents. One of the messages this movie seems to be trying to convey is about digging deeper past the surface actions before putting a label on a child. Wouldn’t it have been more effective if the kid would have changed his mind and taken responsibility for his actions but after Lacey had left the scene of the crime? Or some other extenuating circumstances?

The next case is a boy named Teddy who is apparently planting seedlings (In December?) with his classmates. He sprays bleach on everyone’s plants except his own! Why? Were they in some kind of plant competition? Why would a kid be so malicious? It’s never made clear. Isabel’s assistant thinks that he meant to spray fertilizer, not bleach. But if that’s true, why would he not fertilize his own plant? Isobel later claims it was the only bottle of bleach in a row of fertilizer bottles so it must have been a mistake. Which is clearly what the viewer is supposed to believe. But the frame showing the bottles clearly shows that is not true.  And why would bottles of bleach be right next to fertilizer in a children’s garden in the first place? And he was definitely acting guilty and sneaky. Making mountains out of mole hills? Maybe. But it was disengaging and distracting for no reason. Nothing about it made sense. If he was spraying bleach on innocent little baby plants that is more than just mischievous, it is very concerning behavior. The lesson of not jumping to conclusions about kids’ motivations was confused and murky.

Those two cases are just prologue to Isabel’s main case of Charlie, played by Cadence Compton, who was fantastic. 11-year-old Charlie is an amateur magician we first see making a little kid’s $20 bill “disappear.” Basically she steals it from him. And the other older kids are so impressed that they start waving their money at her so she can make all their money “disappear” too. What the Hell. As far as we see, she never gives them their money back, and the kids never report her to the authorities either. Again what would have served the moral of the story was her giving their money back when judgmental Isabelle wasn’t looking. Or maybe using the money to buy a warm coat for a homeless kid, or do some other good deed. No, what she did was more than just “naughty.” She does other bad stuff too. But since Isabel is now dating her handsome father Jason (very much against the rules but she couldn’t care less all of a sudden), she starts looking to make an exception for Charlie and protect her from getting coal instead of presents. Because you see, Charlie’s mother died last year, so all is forgiven and excused. Plus she picks up litter. We find out later that when she did get coal for Christmas last year, her Dad secretly replaced it with real presents anyway. I’m like, “Maybe a little coal in her stocking would have done her a lot of good!” Isabel is breaking all the rules when it comes to this one girl because of her crush on Charlie’s father. It just wasn’t right or fair to all the other gray-area kids. Not that Charlie was actually that “gray area” in my opinion. But let’s just overlook Isabel’s shady behavior. I mean it’s Lacey Chabert after all.

I won’t go on with other examples of badly presented and mixed messages, but trust me. Isabel gets closer to Jason, finds out she has been doing more harm than good in putting kids on the “Naughty List,” and Charlie is miraculously transformed from bad girl to good girl at the drop of a hat. As it turns out, next year Isabelle’s boss (Steve Bacic) is going to take the whole human element out of labeling the children of the world and rely strictly on the algorithm. There will no longer be any excuses or human input. A now wiser Isabelle is so upset by this, that she quits and then decides to visit the top man, Santa Claus, along with Charlie and Jason to plead her case: No child is ever really naughty, they are just trying to find their way in the complicated adult world. No comment. But it all ends in a happy ending with a world free of coal, naughty lists, and children not being held accountable for their actions. I’m sorry, but this is a 5 in my book.