It Barks.

So this is the last movie of 2024’s Countdown to Christmas. I didn’t review as many as I wanted to. This will be my 20^th one but last year, I reviewed 27 and the year before that 45! How did I do that?  And one of the 20 was from 2011 that I ran across, not one of this year’s. I wish I could blame my lack of inspiration on the movies. As usual there were some real winners, and some losers, but I didn’t review many real losers. Until today. No, to my surprise, it really wasn’t that horribly bad. It features the return of Jessica Lowndes to Hallmark after her defection to GAF. She is even more beautiful than before, thanks largely to considerably toned down makeup for this movie. However, her lack of authenticity in her acting  hasn’t changed a bit, nor her vocal fry, intonation, or lack of enunciation.  However, she is competent over half the time and she has her moments. I keep waiting for a breakthrough but I have a soft spot for her and hope she stays with Hallmark. Her leading man is the winner of Hallmark’s competition show, Finding Mr. Christmas. And as I never saw that series and am not likely to, this is where I found him. It was his first acting job, and it shows. But I’ve seen worse. Somewhere. If he keeps acting, I’m sure he will improve. He is very hunky, as proven by having to take his shirt off and discombobulating poor Jessica. Would have seen that scene coming from the international space station.

Jessica plays Mia, who works for the Seattle Travel Bureau which promotes tourism for the city. She is followed home one day by a cute dog she rescues from a killer fence. The next day, she tries to drop him off at a pet rescue center, but is turned away by our hero as the center is full. They hate each other, she, for good reason. He is a real jerk of spectacular proportions. In fact, my judgement of Mr. Christmas’s acting may have been influenced by how much I hated his character. So if that’s the case, I’m sorry, guy. “Max” is officious, mean, and has such a high bar for aspiring pet owners to adopt one of his dogs that he coldly rejects a nice suburban mother’s application, yet won’t take Mia’s dog, despite her telling him she would not be a good dog parent.  She is forced to foster him because she is not heinous or cruel, and Max lets her, even though she is clueless about raising a dog, and he calls her apartment a death trap. So maybe health and safety not his first priority? Not surprisingly, his pet rescue center is struggling to pay the bills. I hated this guy with the heat of a thousand suns.  However, he does apologize later and does some groveling. So I let him live, even though he was always doing something lame. Anyway, her dog, Russell, and Max’s dog, Jules, fall in love which forces the two to spend time together especially since Mia’s videos of the doggy duo  have gone viral and “Jussell’s” love affair has kept thousands of Seattleites glued to their screens. In fact, one wonders why one of his thousands of fans hasn’t stepped up to adopt Russell. Max’s excuse for his behavior, (that is, keeping many dogs from good, if not perfect, homes) is that his and Jules’ hearts were both broken when his girlfriend left for Los Angeles and took her dog with her who was Jules’ doggy girlfriend before Russell. Sorry, I’m not buying it.

Mia, on the other hand, I liked.  She won me over right away when she wakes up with potato chips all over her sheets, and she grabs a few to eat for breakfast. When she wakes up to Russell’s eating her feather pillows and overturning all of her plants, (after stepping barefoot in his pee) she tells him, “There is room for only one hot mess here, and that’s me!” Jessica was funny in these scenes. So we are getting not so subtle hints that Mia has some secret tragedy or at least some serious life disruption that she is running from. **Spoiler Alert** I was quite taken aback when it turned out that she was a former surgeon who got reprimanded by her hospital for operating on a woman who was in a coma and dying without the proper paperwork filled out. This kind of soured her on being a doctor. Though it might have also been because she says she is not good at Math. (Cover your ears, Danica Mckellar!) Towards the end, her doctor parents, whom she has been trying to avoid, try to tell her she can’t save everyone but she shouldn’t stop trying. They were totally right of course, and that’s when I started to not like her so much. What a waste. And her career decision at the end, after Max’s Pet Rescue is saved by a fundraising festival and a large check from Mia’s parents, did not make me change my mind. She decides to throw all of her medical and surgical training for humans away and start all over again to become a vet. Hope she doesn’t lose any furbabies, because here we go again with the quitting trying to save pets as well as people, and throwing a career away.

So despite some bright spots in the script, the big picture was a “Nope” from me. It’s a “5 1/2” because of the cute dog actors, and a funny cameo by Jonathan Bennett. And Max’s cute and smart sister Penny, played by Cassandra Sawtell who was an oasis of charm and talent.