I think maybe I need to figure out some sort of BAD ranking. Like, boring is a 1 but an awful script is 8 or something. It might make it easier to decide just how bad a movie is.

Sam (Vanessa Lengies) finally got the job she wanted. On her first day, she finds out that her boyfriend, Will’s (René Escobar Jr), company bought her new company and fired a lot of the staff. Feeling weird that he saved her job, Sam immediately quits and goes back to her hometown, where she reconnects with her high school sweetheart, Noah (Corey Sevier).

Heart of the Holidays is a mess. At the beginning of the movie, Sam is a whiz at planning things. I didn’t even realize that she worked in the financial industry because she was so busy planning things. (I think she was supposed to be convincing the guy replacing her to work for the company? I’m not really sure what she was doing.) But when she moves home, she is terrible at everything…except planning a pop-up food bank on Christmas Eve. I think that the writers wanted her to be a “hometown girl finds that community is important” character or something. That doesn’t really come through. She talks about how she wanted to work with charities but then she became a stockbroker? Her character makes no sense.

The plot isn’t all that different. It wants to be “big city girl returns to small hometown to find she still loves her hunky ex-boyfriend.” While that does happen, it goes about it the wrong way. The writers tried to throw in another woman, Marina (Tina Jung), to tempt Noah away….but at no point does it feel like those two would ever be a couple. It feels like this was written by high schoolers.

Seriously, Hallmark. Step up your game. No one should watch this movie. As a matter of fact, can I unwatch it?