Merry Textmas may be the weirdest Christmas movie I have watched this season. I’ll try to explain…

Gaby (Ariana Ron Pedrique) lives in Austin, TX and develops apps for a living. As she helps her family plan for their Christmas trip to Mexico to visit her grandmother, she accidentally adds the phone number for Alex (Rodrigo Massa) to their text chain. Since Alex was planning on spending the holiday alone, Gaby’s family invites him to go to Mexico with them.

The biggest thing I hated about this movie is the ADR. For those that don’t know, ADR (or Automated Dialogue Replacement) is when actors re-record their lines in a studio while watching their film footage. That is why you’ll get normal sounding lines then all of a sudden all of the background noise has dropped out and you can hear the actor crystal clear. They did a lot of ADR in Merry Textmas but it wasn’t done well. I don’t know if there was a lot of background noise in the scenes or someone thought the actors’ accents were too thick or what but it was very distracting.

I honestly think this movie would have been better if it was entirely in Spanish. The big conflict happens because Alex doesn’t speak Spanish but they could have easily fixed that by having him speak a different dialect of Spanish or something. Or that he speaks Spanish badly. I appreciate that, since this aired on Lifetime, they felt that it had to be mostly English but I think the movie suffered for it.

While I really want to recommend Merry Textmas, I don’t think I can. I love that it highlighted Mexican Christmas traditions but it didn’t spend nearly enough time on the traditions and the ADR was so bad. I’m sure there are better movies that show off Mexican traditions.