Once Upon a Prince

For me this movie was kind of flat, but I can't say i did not enjoy it, I also cannot say I plan to watch it again. Its nowhere in the class of a 'princess for christmas' or 'Once upon a Holiday', but it is better than one or two others royal Christmas style movies Hallmark has put out.

Nothing about this movie stood out for me, and nothing about it brought it down. While I went and bought the two I afore mentioned, I would not buy this one.

As in most hallmark movies, this one is very clean- PG. It does have humorous moments and a few serious ones. If U are looking for an escape from the modern movie body counts, foul language, cigarettes and drugs that often dominate movies today, U will be relieved to watch this and will enjoy it to some extent.

The story is pretty much what you would expect.

What does set this apart is the fact that the movie avoids all the most of the cringeworthy moments of other movies in the genre.

The Queen and the long time girlfriend don't descend into hyperbole very often, the prince himself isn't a complete moron, and no one overdoes the royal pantomime too much.

Add in some slightly above average one liners, a better quality cast than normal (most of them seem to have some meatier roles on their resume) and a bit of chemistry between the leads, and you have a solid 8 from me.

It is complete trash, but it is high quality complete trash.

On a Georgian island, Susanna Truitt (Megan Park) works at her parents' gardening store. She has a bad day. Instead of a marriage proposal from long-time boyfriend Adam, he dumps her. She expected a life including starting her landscape architecture business with him. She gets a flat tire but then dashing Nate comes to her rescue. When her father is hospitalized, he volunteers to help out at the store. He gets her a landscape design job for the high class Mrs. Waller. What she doesn't know is that he's a real prince of Cambria and a photographer catches them together. The Queen is unhappy and orders him home.

Megan Park is cute. The prince is cute. It's not the most daring of coupling but they are cute. It's cute. Royalty in one of these TV romance movies often struggles for scale. That's the case here. The castle is not much of a castle. The royal grandeur is not that grand. There are a couple of nice gardens but that's the limits of the production. The story has limited drama. It's a cute Hallmark movie but it's not that much.

Another prince movie! So many of the plot points seem similar to the last prince movie I saw, right down to the queen doing everything she could to embarrass the usurper American. And once again the climax is a royal ball. And several other similarities. Are these movies written using a template?

The positives of this movie are Megan Park and Jonathan Keltz. They make an extremely cute couple. Megan Park does an excellent job as sweet and humble girl. She struggles with the insecurities of her relatively humble position in the world of royalty, yet somehow she doesn't lose her inner confidence and identity. Jonathan Keltz is commanding and confident. I can totally believe him as prince and king. He refuses to cave in to pressure. Sara Botsford as the Queen is intimidating but not cruel, nor is the rival Ginny. All in all, despite the fact that the story is cookie cutter, I found it to be executed in much better fashion.

Perhaps the last scene stands out as well.

I like plots where the situation causes the tension rather than the characters' meddling so the first part of this one was fine. However I'm exhausted from overbearing mother movies and couldn't make it to the end. Public life is not an easily-solved fairytale and the sooner movies stop depicting the Disney Princess format, the better.