A '90s Christmas

At the conclusion of “A ’90s Christmas,” right as reformed workaholic lawyer Lucy Miller (Eva Bourne) is spilling her guts, the camera goes in for a close-up, and that’s when you realize Lucy’s glasses frames do not have any lenses. Was this a props person oversight? Was there a glare on the lens in the camera and so they took them out thinking no one would notice? Is this supposed to evoke how she can metaphorically see clearly now? What is happening??? It’s a little thing, but it’s evocative of how this Hallmark Countdown to Christmas ostensible ode to the nineties gets all the little things all wrong, an especially egregious oversight in a movie about time travel. The time traveler is Lucy, who lives in Chicago and hasn’t been home in years, even though home is Milwaukee, less than two hours away. Celebrating Christmas alone, she runs into her old high school flame Matt (Chandler Massey), strangely costumed less like a heartthrob than a Staples employee in an unflattering long sleeve red polo. Forced to confront her past, she is then forced to relive her past when a mystical rideshare transports her home for Christmas 1999. 

Rather than cast two different actors to play Lucy and Matt in the present-day and the past, “A ’90s Christmas” employs the same actor. Cost-effective, perhaps, but it means that in the present-day scenes, they look too young to be as old as they’re supposed to be, and in the past scenes, they look too old to be as young as they’re supposed to be, underlining the movie’s ultimate stranded-in-the-middle aesthetic, an overriding not-quite-right sensation. That ambivalence is furthered in Bourne’s bland performance, hardly on par with, say, Emily Arlook, who infuses another 2024 Hallmark Countdown to Christmas entry, “Leah’s Perfect Gift,” with nimble comic timing and genuine verve, and reminds us how these movies can succeed more than they have any right to with some actorly pep. In fairness, Bourne is not helped by the script, which barely conceives of her legal occupation as anything beyond A Character Trait and connects the inevitable dots with little flair, or the direction. When Lucy first arrives home in 1999, she greets her old dog, dead lo these 25 years, and…reacts like she just saw the dog eight hours ago? Say cut! Try another take! Tell her, “Act like you’re seeing your beloved dog for the first time in a quarter-century!” WHAT IS HAPPENING???? Lucy is like Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Terminator 2”: “Why do you cry?”

What’s worst, though, is that either “A 90s Christmas” won’t, or possibly can’t commit to the 90s bit. There are glimpses. Lucy’s little sister (Alex Hook), at least, is costumed to look like she’s on her way to Lilith Fair and Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” heard on the radio briefly suggests a role as “A ’90s Christmas’s” “I Got You, Babe.” Alas, that one play of the 90s alt rock staple is the only real pop culture reference we get, likely because it was the only one they could afford, and denoted in how we see a conspicuously modified version of the poster of the movie in which “Kiss Me” appeared tacked to Lucy’s childhood bedroom wall – that is, “She’s All That” rechristened as She’s All There. Later we get some sort of dreck that is 90s hip hop as sanctioned by the Hall family. There’s one dial up Internet joke, but after an initial mention of Y2K, it never comes up again. Lucy tells her best friend Nadine (a valiant Jenny Raven, trying to add some life) to buy stock in Apple, but doesn’t say, hey, FYI, there’s no WMDs, call Senator Herb Kohl, or maybe check out dual Canadian citizenship in 15 years. The characters constantly reference “Friends” but “A ’90s Christmas” doesn’t look like “Friends”; it’s not vintage. Why are we going back in time if we are not going back in time? You can see the problem in Lucy’s costuming; she has 90s bangs on top but the eternal Hallmark beachy waves on the bottom. In Hallmark Christmas land, way back when still looks an awful lot like any other time.