At first, I thought Secretly Santa was going to be a Cinderella-themed Christmas movie. But they dropped that plotline for a stupid one about an app. Ugh.
Miranda (Alicia Dea Josipovic) and Paul (Travis Nelson) each run an app that helps people choose appropriate Christmas presents for the people in their life. Unbeknownst to them, they meet up at a costumed Santa-themed bar crawl and begin to fall in love. Before they can exchange information, they get separated but Paul has a glove that Miranda left behind to help him find her. Professionally, Paul’s company is planning on buying Miranda’s app and merging the two together. The two of them get tasked with figuring out how to make the app better by learning more about how people choose the perfect gift.
This movie would have been a million times better if they ditched the stupid app story and kept with the Cinderella plot. First off, if you need an app to tell you what the perfect gift is, you need to pay more attention to the people around you. Second, how could an app possibly know the perfect gift without some Facebook-level stalking of your target’s online life? It’s stupid.
On top of the dumb story, Josipovic and Nelson have terrible chemistry. The writers try to give them this flirting by fighting vibe but they don’t come off as flirting. They just come off as mean to each other. They are a terrible couple.
I don’t want to talk about this movie any more. It’s awful. Don’t watch it. I wish I had those 90 minutes back in my life. I wish I didn’t fast forward through the commercials so that maybe one of those would have been worth my time.