One Royal Holiday represents the latest Hallmark movie focused on, sigh, a girl falling in love with a prince.
Yeah, you’ve seen this one before.
And yeah, it’s brand new.
Hallmark first released One Royal Holiday on October 31, 2020, because Hallmark clearly does not recognize Halloween as a real holiday. Hate Christmas prince movies? This one doesn’t make the subgenre any better.
What's in this review
What’s One Royal Holiday about?
One Royal Holiday is another in a long line of Christmas prince holiday movies shown repeatedly on the Hallmark channel.
A young, uppity cardiac nurse just went on her Christmas vacation and travels to her father’s small town inn. During a brief stop at a convenience store, she runs into a surly, youngish looking man (SPOILER ALERT: The surly dude is the crown prince of the tale.).
Hallmark movies typically include some bat shit crazy plot points. One Royal Holiday is no exception.
The prince and his small entourage learn all flights out of the Connecticut area are delayed due to an impending winter storm. OK. Not likely, but not completely nuts.
Since the flights are cancelled, the prince needs to find lodging.
What’s their solution? Drive an hour out of the way to some podunk town. Apparently, the town contains a Christmas themed inn. Of course, the love interests father owns this shady-ass inn.
But it gets worse.
Their cut-rate Hallmark version of an Uber driver won’t drive them to the inn because he has plans later. OK again, seems legit if you hired some random guy off some cut rate app to drive some royal family around.
So what’s the logical next step? That’s right. The Queen, her crappy head of security, and crown prince get into a car with the same stranger that suggested the far away inn in the first place.
Off they travel to this far away inn, hoping to avoid a snowstorm that has already cancelled flights even though not a flake has fallen.
You can guess the rest of the plot. Delay after delay causes the little royal family to stay at the inn as the prince and the inn keeper’s daughter slowly fall in love. Aww.
What does the movie add to the Christmas prince movie genre?
In fairness, One Royal Holiday contain a few minor twists on the Christmas prince genre. The “twists” include:
- Most of these movies feature a “playboy” prince. Grant it, Hallmark versions of “playboy” where they are seen with a few ladies, but they don’t even kiss. And, the playboy prince always ends up to be a misunderstood and emotionally shattered good guy. Prepare to have your world rocked. This prince turns out to be a misunderstood uptight dick. And really, not much changes for him throughout the movie. If anything, the main love interest manages to only partially remove the stick that found itself wedged up his ass.
- Unlike when Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman (Jane Seymour) plays a queen (A Royal Christmas), this queen provides down to Earth advice to her douchebag of a son. She encourages him to seek love with a commoner because reasons.
- The main love interest works as a cardiac nurse. <SPOILER ALERT> A few years earlier, she had helped care for the prince’s now deceased father. OH!!!! Destiny!! That’s the final reason he needed to commit his heart to her!
Frequently (?) asked questions…
Do people really ask that many questions about Hallmark movies? Yes, sadly they do.
Where was One Royal Holiday filmed?
Really? Who wants to know this shit?
Anyway, if you are curious where you can plan your next trip to in order to really live the One Royal Holiday experience, you will need to visit Putnam, Woodstock, and Hartford in Connecticut.
If you really want to get specific, you would need to visit:
- The Mansion at Bald Hill
- Woodstock Academy
- The Inn at Woodstock Hill
- Connecticut Convention Center
- a random Brownstone private home in Hartford (good luck with finding that)
- Downtown Putnam
- The Christmas Barn
- Bond Ballroom
Dear God. Do people actually do this?
Where can you watch One Royal Holiday?
The Hallmark Original movie will likely play randomly throughout their Christmas movie line up starting in 2020. You could also watch it on FrndlyTV. Yeah. I didn’t make that up. Hallmark actually has its own streaming service for its hundreds of nearly identical romance movies. If you sign up, you can watch One Royal Holiday anytime you want.
One Royal Holiday Review
One Royal Holiday will make you hate Christmas prince movies
Overall
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Plot
(2.5)
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Characters
(2)
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Watchability
(3)
Husband's review
My wife insists on watching Hallmark movies, specifically, Christmas Hallmark movies. Her itch gets particularly bad during the fall, summer, and pretty much every other time of year too.
In some cases, Hallmark Christmas movies create an awfully funny world unintentionally. They feature far fetched plot points, wooden acting, and the same fill-in-the-blank movie over and over again. And though each sucks a bit of testosterone from your body, they can provide some amusement.
One Royal Christmas tried, it really did, to match the crappiness level of it’s many, many predecessors, but it couldn’t quite live up to the challenge. I’ve come to believe that creating a laughably bad, monotone movie is an art form. A questionable art form, but one that appears to take skill to pull off well nonetheless. And this steaming pile of dog shit didn’t do that.
Here is my list of why One Royal Christmas won’t become or at least shouldn’t become a film on regular rotation for Hallmark during their holiday season line up:
- The prince acts like a dick. These types of movies need to feature a misunderstood, emotionally unbalanced Prince who just wants a girl to like him for his humdrum personality.
He has to be involved in at least one charity, preferably an orphanage where he can amuse the kids with song, dance, sports, or some other hobby, but a soup line or homeless shelter would work nicely too.
The prince also needs to fight against royal duties, usually in the form of an overbearing Queen mother hell bent on destroying happiness. Jane Seymour does this very well.
And finally, there needs to be a betrothed, title hungry duchess that needs to challenge the main love interest.
This shitty movie didn’t feature any of that. Instead, the prince pretty much just came across as an icy dick who shriveled up in the cold and never really recovered.
- The Queen mother presented as quirky and fun. Far from sabotaging the prince’s effort to bone a commoner, this Queen actually acted as a wingman for the prince.
- Anna, the female main love interest, practically oozes naivety and Christmas spirit from every pore. She just loves Christmas so much, she needs to share it with everyone. The over the top performance came across as a bit much even for Hallmark.
- The prince’s main drama revolved around his inability to write a speech to address his subjects. He just had to get the speech right to let his subjects know just how stiff of a board he really was.
- Every plot point and movement felt horribly forced. The drama in most Hallmark movies centers around some far-fetched concept, like the Christmas shopping ad needs to air on December 24th to save the company from certain ruin. One Royal Holiday focused on one reason after another that the royal family couldn’t leave the country yet, allowing the forced lovers to eventually spend enough time together to develop a healthy case of Stockholm Syndrome.
- They made nearly every character annoyingly quirky to be funny, I think. I know shit about being funny, so I’m not sure.
- They didn’t define where Galwick, their make-believe country, exists with vague references to location. All we learn is that it is somewhere in Europe, and it’s signature dessert is akin to a gas-station éclair. How am I supposed to be drawn into the story if I don’t know where Galwick is supposed to be? I may or may not have the goal of drawing a map of Europe that includes all the fictional kingdoms of Hallmark. I might throw in some Netflix countries and may even Genovia.
Pros
They end up falling in love?
It adds one more made-up country, Galwick, to the map of Europe.
Cons
The prince looks dried up and old AF.
Every single plot point feels forced and lame.
The main female love interest secretes Christmas spirit, it oozes from every orifice like a strange STD.
Love to hate cheesy Christmas romance movies?
If you love to hate, are ashamed you love Christmas romance movies, or just plain hate them, check out my Holidate review.
