A Royal Christmas Crush

'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 am so sick of all this royalty nonsense. And before you start screaming Megan and Princess Diana, Princess Di's family were aristocrats. Her father and brother were Earls and her grandfather was the 7th Earl Spencer. Megan was in the "commoner" category, according to royalty experts. And by the way, if you're going to do a royal story line you could at least observe royal protocols. You don't touch a royal without permission but in Hallmark you sure do.

The saccharin sweet drivel Hallmark is pumping is getting more and more ridiculous. It's been rehashed so often it's become a sad little trope that has elevated redundancy to a whole new level. Just stop.

It's like the writers just said, "Hey, you know we could keep this royal story line as a template. Just change the location of the fictional kingdom, the names of the two love interests and voila! We're done.

I KNOW they have other creative ideas because I watched The Christmas Quest and The Finnish Line this year which were very good. And previously they offered My Southern Family Christmas, Christmas at Notting Hill, A Heidelberg Holiday and My Norwegian Holiday all of which were delightful . I love the ones where you expand the characters and we learn the customs and rituals of where they are from. Three Wise Men and a Baby and its sequel were excellent.

Come on, writers, wake up that gray matter and give us more than the obligatory flour fight in the kitchen, the Christmas tree lighting in the town square (with all 18 persons of the town), the misunderstanding (which occurs always in the last 15 minutes) and the reconciliation, which always happens so the movie can end Hallmark happy and everyone is smiling.

Okay I know these are Hallmark movies but this one is so far fetched with the ages of the actors it's just absolutely absurd.

The actor playing Prince Henry (Stephen Huszar) must be pushing 40. There's nothing wrong with that except when you have the actress playing his mother, the Queen as being in her 30's. Really the 1 grey streak in her hair does not qualify her to be 60. And they don't even list the actor who plays the King but he looks to be in his early 40s.

The Prince crush story has been done so many times, I have lost count. Boring.

I just can't image there is no one at Hallmark that can come up with a better story or someone else that has to say enough already!!!

Hallmark's Christmas in July original movies are either really great (Crashing through the Snow) or major duds, and this one falls squarely in the latter camp. An inane premise (some nondescript Royal Family commissions an ice castle to be built each year for them to spend the holidays), terrible casting (pretty sure the Prince's mom is about the same age as the Prince) and an insipid plot drag this one to the depths of barely watchable. The royal family hardly spends any time in the ice castle. Stephen Huszar's accent comes and goes, and he can't decide if he's supposed to do an English accent or a Nordic accent, so mostly it comes across as a half-hearted attempt at trying to be a snob. A papparrazo wanders around snapping photos at his leisure. Where's security? The only thing this movie had going for it is Katie Cassidy has the prettiest eyes, which apparently won over Huszar because they are now an item.

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.