C'era una volta un principe

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.

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.

I don't know if i'm still overwhelmed by Harry & Meghan's wedding (which is totally the reason I watched this) or because I haven't seen a Hallmark movie in a month (the longest I haven't seen one in two years, don't judge) but this was amazing.

I like royalty movies, but I haven't seen any of the ones that premiere in April/May 2018 because I didn't need any more of them. Turns out I did.

This plot, unfortunately, it' the same as the rest. Prince whose father died and is about to take the throne meets an American, commoner girl and they fall in love. But I still enjoyed it, very much! The last scene almosts has me crying.

The chemistry between the leads was amazing, the actor who played Nate was so charming and it was SO refreshing to see new faces, I'm glad I watched it. Probably one of the best.

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.

These "I fancy an actual prince" themed Hallmark films are never my favourite, but this is actually nicely done, with two good performances from the leads.

Well worth a watch.