A Nanny for Christmas

This is an above average Christmas film to make you feel happy and full of the joy of the season. It tells the story of Ally (Vaugier), an advertising executive who loses her job just weeks before Christmas. Unable to pay the bills and mortgage she asks her friend, Tina (Thompson) for a lending hand, as her sister works for a top Advertising Agency. Unfortunately, there's some confusion in what positions she's applying for and instead of getting a job in the company Ally is hired to Nanny the bosses kids.

One of the saving graces of the film is that the kids are not nasty. So many of these types of film have the children being shown that it's better to be nice than naughty, so as to avoid Santa's naughty list. So what we have is a heartwarming tale of a family pulled apart by ambition and career finding their way back to the right track and getting their priorities straight.

The acting, on the whole, is pretty decent, though there are a few moments where Cain does a good job of hamming it up. I'm not too sure if this is intentional, though, for me, the film would have been stronger if his character had been straight and not over the top - as the comedic value was lost to the film.

Overall, this is a nice Christmas film that I would recommend to all who love this time of year. It's also a nice family drama and romance, so if you enjoy them then grab a hot chocolate and put your feet up this winter and enjoy.

The movie was ok...it's a romance Christmas movie so I didn't expect much . The one thing that bothered me throughout the film was the main character's eyebrows! They were horrible and over tweezed! Her whole look was so horrible....no makeup and shabby dried straw like hair... she just didn't look the part she was portraying. Very distracting. The acting was average and Dean Cain was overacting for sure.

A movie where the protagonist creates an unnecessary problem for herself.

Dean Cain plays VERY against type in this movie, as a bombastic company owner. When Ally Leeds, an advertising exec, pitches a campaign including an element certain to anger him, he storms out of the room and fires her ad agency, leading to her dismissal.

Later, thinking she's interviewing for a job at another agency as an ad exec, the owner of that agency thinks she's applying as a nanny and gives her that job. A bit desperate for ANY income, she accepts.

He unorthodox nanny techniques are fun, but complication arise when she falls for an ad exec at that company and pretends to also work there as an ad exec.

This is a fun movie, not at the top of our list, but one we're just fine with seeing again from time to time. It helps that we love Dean Cain, even though his role here is minor and, as I wrote, against type.

I love all the silly, "you can see the happy ending after the first 3 minutes" Christmas movies. I love them. I watch a ton every year. But this one just doesn't know what it wants to be and fails miserably trying. This movie has at least 4 (maybe 5) typical Christmas movie plots going at once, and doesn't have enough time to develop motivation of characters or resolutions for any them. Even for a Christmas movie people act in extremely contrived ways. You can't figure out why they would do that. And you don't really like them enough to care. Back stories are hinted at but not developed. It seemed the author had no idea how to set up the situation so just randomly got people to move to starting places for the story. Then there is too much plot to resolve, so abracadabra a small event or two suddenly makes everyone make decisions to tie up a happy ending for all the plots elements. Motivations for change are completely inadequate. If they had picked one or two of the several problems in the characters lives and focused on motivations and resolutions for that, it could have been a good movie. But it wasn't.