The first weekend of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies ends with A Kismet Christmas. Yes, I also had to look up the meaning of ‘kismet’ since they use it a million times in the movie. It means destiny or fate. I guess they can only use ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’ so many times before they run out of titles. It’s just kismet, right?
Mia (Marilu Henner) bakes kismet cookies - cookies that will tell you who your true love is when you sleep with one under your pillow on Christmas Eve. One year, Mia’s granddaughter, Sarah (Sarah Ramos), sneaks a kismet cookie under her pillow. It told her that her true love was the boy next door, Travis (Carlo Marks). Unfortunately, Travis was getting married that day. Embarrassed, Sarah rips up the recipe for the cookies and leaves the town of New Britain. Years later, Sarah is a children’s book author. Her publisher runs a contest and the winner lives in New Britain. Sarah is forced to return to town and face both her grandmother and her childhood crush.
On one hand, I found A Kismet Christmas interesting. On the other hand, the slow parts were very slow. I liked the idea of magical cookies that told you who your true love is. If the movie dove deep into that, I think I would have liked it more. However, since Sarah tore up the recipe within the first 15 minutes of the movie, the cookies aren’t around a lot. Instead, we get a lot of people hemming and hawing about how there aren’t any kismet cookies and they wish there were kismet cookies so they could know FOR SURE that a certain person liked them. And since there are no cookies to be baked, Grandma Mia is fairly useless. She makes very vague statements about things and doesn’t tell Sarah any of the important news that is fairly necessary to her life. I think the movie would have been more interesting if the cookies were still around and the conflict is whether the magic in the house is leaving since Mia is planning on selling it.
Instead of the cool things, A Kismet Christmas focuses on Travis and his daughter, Jasmine (Rubi Tupper). In the beginning, Sarah was mortified about having to face Travis again after interrupting his wedding. She got over that so quickly and she spends a majority of the movie helping Jasmine with her contest-winning project or helping Travis make Jasmine happy. I understand that the writers wanted them to spend more time together to push the romance but it’s insinuated that they have always loved each other. Again, the focus should have been on the magic cookies and house. They could have easily had Travis and Jasmine try to help figure out why the house is losing its magic and how to get it back. It’s a much more interesting story.
Should you watch it? Probably not. Unfortunately, I think the boring parts outweigh the interesting parts. Which makes me sad because there was so much potential there. At least it’s only the beginning of the movie season. Maybe there will be something better soon.
