By Geno McGahee
My Xmas movie review spree continues with the made for TV movie “CHRISTMAS ANGEL.” This movie stars Kevin Sorbo and since this movie is relatively religious in tone, I was eager to see it. He was amazing in GOD’S NOT DEAD and although he didn’t bring the great overacting and sinister character here, he was still good and that goes for the rest of the cast. This group of actors and actresses brought a lot to the flick.
Olivia Mead (Izabela Vidovic) sits in her class as the rest of her classmates talk about their Christmas wishes. She begins to think about ways to help them and that’s when her friend, Lucas (Tyler Humphrey) brings up the wishing house. There is a house that Olivia lives directly next to that is boarded up and abandoned (or so they thought) and the rumor is that if you make a wish, throw a rock, and break a window, the wish comes true. They begin throwing rocks and the wish that Olivia makes comes true. This now attracts many that are picking up the practice of breaking windows for wishes. The owner of the house, Nathan (Sorbo), is not happy and notes that he will call the police on anyone destroying his property. Olivia’s mother Melinda (Teri Polo) steps up and comes up with a wish box and the wishes continue to come true, with the exceptions of the wishes that are greedy and unrealistic.
Although focusing on the wishes of others, Olivia wants her mother to have a husband and makes that her wish. Curiosity gets the best of her and she wants to see the “angel” inside of the broken down house. She knocks over and over until Elsie (Della Reese) answers and the two begin a dialogue. Elsie is old and mysterious and informs Olivia that she is not an angel but wanted to grant wishes and make the holiday a good one for the ones in need. She makes three baskets. One of them says possible, the other God, and the other stupid. They begin separating them and working together to grant wishes. Olivia discovers that Elsie was a celebrity and wants her to sing again but she talks about her daughter not being part of her life, nobody remembering her, and how she doesn’t sing anymore.
In the meantime, Nathan and Melinda are starting to hit it off and he even forces a kiss on her. Go get her Sorbo. Nathan lets her know that he has a family member having serious health issues and was dumped by his wife because he was shooting blanks. He is looking for a family and Melinda needs a man. She realizes is when she tries to open a jar of jelly. I’m sure that wasn’t the first time she realized it or the most impactful but a man in the house would have been great to open the jar of jelly. If not a man, she could have run out to the store and got one of those squeeze bottle jelly things and she would have been in business.
To get Elsie back in the spotlight, she talks to a sleazy reporter and he jumps on the story. Amazingly, he walks directly into the house and starts taking pictures of everything, including the sleeping Elsie. Olivia tries to stop him which enrages Elsie. She screams “get out” about nineteen times to the kid and now paparazzi are camped out outside of her home.
Lucas’s wish is for a bully to stop pushing him around. It doesn’t work and when Olivia sees it happen again, she tackles the bully and beats him up, but it’s the worst beat down in movie history. There are no sound effects and there is no contact in the punches that Olivia is throwing. It was sort of like the fight in A CHRISTMAS STORY, but they did it right. I don’t know why they didn’t work to make this fight scene any better. A few thuds or smacks would have been enough, but they dropped the ball.
CHRISTMAS ANGEL has a predictable ending and it ends happy across the board. Although this is a movie with religious undertones, it’s not overbearing. They are not shoving the message up your ass every two minutes. The focus of the film was to show that giving is better than receiving and has some very good performances from the cast that they brought in. The writer, Andrea Gyertson Nasfell, also wrote SILVER BELLS, which I was not very fond of. This was a much better, less preachy film.
Rating: 5/10
