A Royal Christmas Crush

Same old story line with new cast. Been there, seen that. The cast is terribly miscast. The leading man looks line he's on the fast slope to 50 and the royal parents would better have been cast as his siblings. The cast seems more suited to down home setting as opposed to pretending to be royalty. This is not more evident than at the"royal ball." Looked more like the local middle school Winter dance than a ball full of monarchs. I actually laughed out loud. And the dinner with the missing prince... why was the hired help at the table with the queen and king? The whole scene was a miss and a mess. Overall, the story was not much better than the execution of it.

First, there are real "ice hotels" built every year, and I suspect the one in this movie is Hotel Grace, built in Quebec.

Many people have commented on the ages of the cast, as "the Prince" looks as old or older than his supposed parents. In truth, the actor playing the King (43) is only four years the Prince's senior (39). The Queen, however, IS actually 21 years older. She just looks great at 60. However, Stephen Huszar is a pretty rough looking 39. I could easily peg him by eye as being in his 50s. Ouch!

The accents are simply irritating, especially Huszar's. The story is the same old Prince meeting the "common girl" with a local rival in the picture. The dialogue is trite and unconvincing ... at its best. At its worst, it's embarrassing.

There are great visuals of the hotel, and for me that's the only draw in this poorly written movie where the cast seems to be mailing it in. They simply have nothing in the way of spark or deep emotion.

By the way, the "spectacular sketches" of dog houses? LOL Simple line drawings that you could barely tell what they are. I'd have bagged the thing there but my wife hadn't had quite enough of it yet. After the next scene with the mother and daughter scheming for her to marry the Prince, she raised her eyebrows to the point I asked if she'd had enough, and she replied "OH YES!".

I don't know why the writers of this movie just had to have her career interest in building "sustainable housing communities ". The whole point of watching Hallmark movies, especially one with a romance with a royal prince or princess is to get away from reality for a couple of hours. I don't want to hear about, listen to dialog about topics, like climate, or the environment that's are already covered 24/7 on the news channels.

Next, it was pretty obvious that they essentially used the same filming location and concept (an ice hotel) as they did for the Hallmark movie Winter Castle. Even the lead female characters had essentially the same color hair.

'A Royal Christmas Crush' Not the best example of a Hallmark Royal movie. For every 'One Royal Holiday' there is one of these: a run of the mill movie redoing tired old tropes with zero imagination.

Quality over quantity is, I think, a phrase Hallmark needs to abide by more often. Just because you can show 40-odd Christmas movies in October-December and a few more for Christmas in July, doesn't mean you should.

'A Royal Christmas Crush' suffers from poor accents (why does every one of these countries, purported to be somewhere in Europe, seem to speak with a British accent?) and very stereotypical characters, and the key fact that the leads - Katie Cassidy and Stephen Huszar - do not have the necessary chemistry. I must admit that the ice castle setting was cool, but, again, it seems every twelfth Hallmark movie these days is set in one - so the originality is starting to wane.

I don't generally review that often because it's Hallmark, & I mean, you know what you're getting into. This movie was terrible! The plot is chewed up, but fine, whatever. This ice castle is too unique to keep using over & over again, but fine, whatever. But the casting?? Katie Cassidy can barely move her new lips or close her mouth & she used to be wonderful from the days of Gossip Girl & on! Trying to watch her speak dialogue was painful. And if they really wanted Stephen Huzsar to have an accent, they really should've paid for a better dialect coach for him. That accent was half American, a quarter Valley, & 3/4 no one knows. And finally, it's 2023 - the bare minimum you can do is change the date on an iPhone so it doesn't show March 12th, 3:13AM in a text convo that's supposed to take place right before Christmas. There's definitely enough in the production budget for that. The only reason I finished this film is because I'm Type A & needed to cross it off of my Hallmark Movie Checklist. Would never recommend it to anyone.