My Sweet Austrian Holiday

I like Wil Kemp and Brittany Bristow. The storyline is like Kimberley Sustad and Paul Campbell - Starlight Cafe. That movie had some energy behind it. This movie had no flicker of chemistry between Kemp and Bristow at all. The surrounding characters had to tell us there was a spark. I do, I really do like Brittany Bristow but her romantic scenes leave alot to be desired in every movie I have watched. Kissing scenes she looks like she is throwing up a wall of defence, as if her husband was watching. Also the chocoalate tempering scene fails to be realistic. Not one of the better Bristow family projects.

6.3 stars.

I worked my way through this story with much patience and low expectations. It has fairly low ratings after all, not in the five zone, but just barely in the six. This indicates, generally speaking, a hit or miss scenario. In this case, it's a big miss for achieving average status and fits securely in the take-it-or-leave-it category, but at least it's better than the could-care-less movies that are actually rare (under 6.0).

So yes, this is below average for sure, it's about as cookie-cutter as can be, and it's about chocolate and about a real estate tycoon who is buying out a building and a person who is trying to save their business. It's probably the most used plot of Hallmark films.

This is really a very slow-moving story. After a half-hour they'd done nothing I was interested in. My wife wanted to hang on a little longer, but after another ten minutes she decided to pull the plug on this one.

This is another of the extremely tired "losing business to new development" trope, and it really makes no sense here. I had no interest in the character of the male lead, and very little in the character of the female lead. Really, no tension and no interesting relationship building. Dialogue less interesting than my neighbors gossiping over a fence.

Added to this were very annoying affected British accents ... in Austria? Why? The Canadian actors were the worst, but the Englishman in the lead tried to affect an upper-crust accent that doesn't belong to him. I had to look him up to even convince myself he's actually English.

Not recommended.

The name of the movie implies that it's in Austria, and all the landscape shots are set in Austria. But someone had the dumb idea to edit the movie to be based in Quebec City in the Canadian version. All online reviews state that the main character moves from Cincinnati to Vienna to take over her grandparents chocolate shop. But in the version I watched here in Canada they changed it to she's from Vancouver and went to Quebec City, problem is that the outdoor scenes doesn't even come close to looking like Quebec City (except for the opening shot of chateau Frontenac). Even the overdubbed voices and the many mention of Quebec is said when that character has their back to the camera. If the Movie was supposed to be based in Quebec then why keep the Austrian name of the movie?

Will Kemp is usually very good in the Hallmark Christmas movies, but even he can't save this mashup of over used Hallmark Christmas movie plots. My wife and I started watching the Hallmark Christmas movies during the pandemic for some light hearted enjoyment, but the repetitive plots get tired after a few years. We gave up on this one within 15 minutes. Been there. Done that! The "the building in peril from a real estate developer" and the "food competition" plots mashed into the same movie and moved to a different city or a different country doesn't make it a "new" story. It's like playing Mad Libs. They change the characters names, the location of the town or city, and combine a few different tropes and think that makes it "new".