By Geno McGahee
I initially saw the cover of this flick with the two muscular dudes nearly naked with Santa hats and smiling and I wasn’t going to watch it. If you believe in the magic of Xmas, there was a potential that Santa would get confused and send those dudes to my house on Christmas, and I wasn’t going to take that chance. I would hate to be the star of “I have to sit on a pillow this Christmas.”
So, I turned on the Lifetime channel and CHRISTMAS IN THE CITY was on and I didn’t associate it with the sexy man cover. After watching thing and looking at the cover again, I may never suck on a candy cane again.
Wendy Carroll (Ashley Williams) has a daughter and is having a hard time keeping her candy shop financially afloat. It was once her dad’s shop but now it’s going under. I remember when I was a kid, they had penny candy and you could get a shit ton of candy for a couple bucks. Now, they weigh that shit by the pound and do you dry. It’s no wonder Wendy is going under if she does that approach. I’m not paying 25 bucks for two pounds of Swedish fish.
To make some money and save her store, Wendy goes to the city and gets a job at Wolman’s Department Store, moving in with her friend, Angie (Shanola Hampton) and her young daughter, Grace (Kylie Noelle Price). The job at the store seems OK until she meets Teanna (Ashanti), a specialist brought in to save the store and make money. She takes her job seriously, but she has big plans, including taking some big money from an investor, taking completely over, and getting rid of the owner, Harry Wolman (David Ralphe).
Teanna has no Christmas spirit and her ideas are not well received by the people that work at the story, especially the end of Christmas bonuses. She also brings in all fake trees and it is those shitty white Christmas trees. Why do people buy those? A fake tree is bad enough, but a white one? She also has another idea that is a kick in the balls to all holiday fans. She’s going to fire Santa.
Santa (Michael Durrell), the real Santa, is working for Wolman’s. I often wonder why these films make a real Santa. I can understand it in films like ELF, but here it just seemed weird. This entire film is based in reality and they add a real Santa into it and they really don’t use him that well. He says a few things that help Wendy get her shit together, but other than that, he’s not really relevant to the story.
Tom Wolman (Jon Prescott), the son of the owner of the company, starts to fall for Wendy, but he’s still fucking up. He is doing what Teanna says and following her lead, which included robbing the workers of their Xmas bonus and a bunch of other bullshit. To Teanna’s credit, the store is making money again. Her methods are working. Then again, if you rob hundreds of workers of a thousand dollar bonus, you can make some money. It doesn’t make it right. I bet she took their company discount away as well.
Wendy leaves Grace with the company daycare but wants to take her young daughter out to meet Santa. A young boy shows interest as well and she brings him too. Security is somewhat loosey-goosey if they just let any woman grab a young kid and drag him out to meet Santa.
When they make their way to see Santa, he’s gone. Wendy learns that Teanna fired him and replaced him with a bunch of muscular smiley dudes without shirts on and with Santa hats. Angry, Wendy finds out that “Tom signed off on it.” I’m sorry. If I was Wendy and I liked Tom, I would be concerned if he was hiring a bunch of male strippers to play Santa. You think they’d balance it out with some hot chicks dressed like elves or Santa or whatever. Then again, this is a department store. What the hell are strippers doing at a department store in the Christmas season? I think I once saw a woman have a nip slip at Walmart on Black Friday, but that’s not the same thing. She wasn’t a hot stripper. She wasn’t hot. She was repulsive.
Wendy leaves her job and Santa finds her and convinces her to give Tom another chance. Meanwhile, Tom finds out that Teanna wants to shit can his old man and he isn’t having it. He has now woken up and wants to bring the store back to where it was, with real Xmas trees and décor and the return of Santa. He convinces Wendy to return and help and then fires Teanna, but I noticed something strange. When they got everything back to normal, there was still a shirtless Santa dude hanging out and singing Christmas songs with the group. Maybe he had nowhere to go or maybe he didn’t get the message that he was fired. I am against firing Santa, but these dudes were just hired too and maybe it wasn’t right to fire them either. Maybe that dude was sending a message that he will be twerking this Christmas and getting a paycheck no matter what that cock Tom says. Good for him.
CHRISTMAS IN THE CITY was pretty good. They balanced it out pretty well. Teanna wore a lot of low cut tops and showed off her chest, which gave a little bit for everyone. Ashanti did a good job as a villain, but I’m not sure she was given a fair shake. She made the store money, did her job, and was fired for it. How the hell was she going to fire the owner anyway? It was probably just bullshit talk that everyone does at work. “Oh, I’m going to kick the boss in the nuts and throw him down a flight of stairs.” We don’t really mean it. It’s just things we say.
I recommend CHRISTMAS IN THE CITY. If you miss it, you won’t be missing a great deal, but you could do a lot worse.
