The Note

I rate this a "7" if you're watching this on a DVR (digital video recorder) and a "6" if not. Basically, this story starts out good, gets cheesy in the middle and is way overdone at the end. If you're armed with the ability to skip through some highly predictable corny stuff in the middle, it's kind of interesting to watch. A saving grace of the movie is that there's a great twist at the end.

Basically, the movie is about a journalist who's about to lose her column "The Heart Healer" due to low readership. While pondering her situation at the ocean, she happens upon a washed up note from a plane that just crashed nearby. She begins to write about her search for the intended recipient and the movie progresses from there.

While it sounds good on the surface, it gets a little cheesy when everyone she meets is somehow "touched" and for the most part "reformed" by the note. For a lot of people, this middle section can be a bit too sappy.

Still, the movie is not "so" bad that I would say it's not worth watching. If you have a DVR, you can spare yourself from some of the scenes by fast-forwarding - and enjoy the overall story line. If not, I'd say it's a bit too hard to sit through without changing the channel.

Poorly written story that's internally inconsistent, amongst other problems, including the dialog and acting.

Clichés: now, let's write another movie filled with clichés in an hour to dump on TV so the station can sell ad-time to holiday card makers. Halmark and others are losing money to the more enjoyable and personal emails, videos, and photos that can be shared directly without trying to find and pay for a card that sort-of says what you're really trying to say. So, they basically pay for movie length ads, in addition to the more well-known TV shows employing more obvious product placement.

The story had potential as a concept, but it's clearly motivated by the desire to promote and sell other things. In short, it's one more reason to limit your TV watching to PBS and Comedy Central and to demand some form of rebate system for the time wasted watching such simplistic stories.

I don't know whether it is the poor sound quality, the flat acting, or the predictable dialogue, but as soon as I tuned in on Amazon Prime I knew it was a Hallmark movie and that did it for me. Why can't they rise above those obvious cheesy elements and aim a little higher?

Admittedly, this movie is extremely sappy, or corny. It lays it on pretty thick. But that doesn't mean that some of that emotion doesn't stick to you.

The acting is good enough as is the production.

The story is a captivating mystery as the viewer longs to see what is the message that a dying man intended for his child. Peyton works her way one by one through the candidates and each one teaches her something about living. If you were really good, you might have seen the answer to the mystery, but I thought the clues were subtle. Unfortunately for me, I already knew the answer because I watched the sequel first.

As in the sequel, I didn't get invested in the relationship between Peyton and King, but the movie was really much more than that story.

The storyline had so much potential. This could have been a blockbuster movie but in the end, your left feeling it was made for TV and was on a tight production schedule. I teared up a couple times but way too often I was left disappointed by the character development or dialogue. Many of the situations were not believable or lacked the gravity of the moment. Many elements just happened for the sake of continuity but seemed forced and kept me from being drawn into the movie. So many instances that were highly emotional and the actors were not reflecting a convincible or honest level of emotion. Good but not great. I can't recommend it.