I ran out of new Hallmark and Lifetime movies so I flipped over to Netflix to give The Princess Switch a try. The Christmas Chronicles was pretty good. Hopefully this won’t disappoint either.
Switch is basically the story of The Prince and The Pauper with a few modern twists. Stacy DeNovo (Vanessa Hudgens) is a baker from Chicago. (Baker - another popular profession in Christmas movies) After a recent break up, her assistant and best friend, Kevin (Nick Sagar) signs her up to compete in a baking competition in Belgravia. Reluctantly, Stacy agrees to participate and the two travel to Belgravia with Kevin’s daughter, Olivia (Alexa Adeosun).
Also in Belgravia is Margaret Delacourt (also Hudgens), Duchess of Montenaro. Margaret is engaged to Belgravia’s Prince Edward (Sam Palladio) but she longs to see what life outside royalty is like. So Margaret convinces Stacy to switch places with her. Of course, Stacy falls in love with Edward and Margaret falls in love with Kevin.
If you are familiar with The Prince and The Pauper, there won’t be any big surprises here. It is the same story but with a female lead. One of things I really liked about the movie is that Kevin’s daughter, Olivia, knew almost immediately that it was not Stacy when she came downstairs on her first Belgravian morning. It gave Margaret a little help on her side (Stacy had Margaret’s assistant, Mrs. Donatelli (Suanne Braun) to help her) and it showed that not everyone in these movies is stupid. Just a nice little change of pace.
While I didn’t mind the big ending, I was a little disappointed that we don’t get to find out what Stacy did with her professional life. (Spoiler ahead, if you don’t want to know the obvious ending to the movie!!) In the beginning of the movie, Stacy was running a fairly successful bakery in Chicago. However, when the movie fast forwards a year to the Stacy/Edward wedding, they don’t tell us what happened with her business. Did she open a branch in Belgravia, like Edward suggested? Did she teach Margaret how to bake so the Duchess could take over the bakery? Did she just leave it all to Kevin? This was a rather large part of who she is…I mean, she literally came to Belgravia for a baking competition…and they don’t even acknowledge it. Maybe they are leaving it open for a sequel. That would be a little annoying but maybe it would be good? I guess I’ll have to watch this year’s sequel to last year’s big Netflix Christmas movie, A Christmas Prince (which had a cameo in this movie!), to see how they handle Christmas sequels. Until then, this isn’t a terrible way to spend roughly two hours. As long as you don’t have anything against princes and doppelgangers, anyway.