The Christmas Quest

“The Christmas Quest” is funny. Oh, it’s funny in a regular way, aiming more for screwball than sentiment, always a welcome reprieve on the Hallmark Channel this time of year, and because Lacey Chabert and Kristoffer Polaha are having so much fun in one another’s presence, in fact, that they inadvertently undersell that their characters used to be divorced and are supposed to be falling back in love. These two never broke up! You couldn’t fool me! I didn’t care! (Filmed in part on location in Iceland, one conversation between the two takes place against the backdrop of the Hallgrimskirkja Church glowing red in the night in downtown Reykjavik, Chabert’s hair whipping wildly in the Nordic wind, and it reminds you how stuffing every scene with everything in the Balsam Hill® catalog in these movies just can’t compete with a little on the ground atmosphere.) No, “The Christmas Quest” is funny because in melding “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” with “National Treasure,” but in a neat gender reversal essentially having Chabert play the Harrison Ford/Nic Cage part and Polaha play the Karen Allen/Diane Krueger part, the movie is a treasure hunt (without action scenes that I’m sure Hallmark couldn’t afford) that leads us to the end of the treasure map to tell us the treasure is in each one of our hearts. Like Christmas itself. It wasn’t supposed to be a punchline, I’m pretty sure, but it felt like the conclusion to a big joke, nonetheless. I laughed, anyway.