Hallmark Channel
Hallmark Channel scales things down for ‘Countdown to Christmas’ after taking us to the Grand Ole Opry, winding up the ‘Merry Thanksgiving Weekend’ with the first of two new movies, The Christmas Cup, which surprisingly is not about an actual sporting event like hockey.
After a knee injury threatens to cut her career short, Staff Sergeant Kelly Brandt (Rhiannon Fish) returns home in low spirits for the holidays. Her family tries to help by encouraging her to lead her hometown team in the annual Christmas Cup against the rival town. It takes a lot of work, but Kelly organizes her team and gets them as competition-ready as she can with the help of Fire Captain Quinn Stokley (Ben Rosenbaum). Sparks begin to fly with Quinn, and through the whole process, Kelly is reminded of how much she loves to lead, but her heart still hopes she will be cleared to return to serve. Kelly ultimately receives the call she has been waiting for; however, it’s not what she expects. With the Marines needing her to report to the Hawaiian base on the day of the competition, Kelly soon realizes there is more than one way to serve a community.
If you tuned into this one thinking it was about a sporting competition, you might have just decided to skip The Christmas Cup, but if you did stick around you would have been treated to a sweet, funny, moving story about family bonds and the love of one’s community. The main plot of the story hinges on the Christmas Cup competition between neighboring towns, but things became a little less friendly as budgetary woes forced the two towns to merge their emergency services operations, so bragging rights to the Christmas Cup is of the utmost importance. This is is also the last year in the term for Longleaf Mayor Brandt, whose late wife captained the team to several wins, so the Brandt family wants the win badly this year, having lost the last seven to the town of Bridgeport. Brandt’s daughter Kelly is also coming home from her military duty after suffering a knee injury, but she hopes that after therapy she will be able to re-enlist. Training for the Cup has fallen to Kelly’s brother Mickey, but despite this being the 50th anniversary of the competition, three of his team members have quit, one is only there because he has to be due to some unruly behavior, and another hopes her singing will get her discovered by a Broadway agent. Kelly reluctantly takes on the job of coach so Mickey can join the team, and they recruit Mickey’s young daughter and Kelly’s friend — and local diner owner — Bree to be part of the team. Kelly really wants to stick it to Bridgeport’s annoying mayor, but she never considered she’d catch feelings for firefighter Quinn. Once she gets called back to duty, sort of, she has to deny her feelings, telling Bree he’s basically a stranger … which he overhears just as he was about to give her a bouquet of flowers, and to make matters worse her departure date has landed on Christmas Day, the day of The Christmas Cup. After her brief return home, Kelly now has to decide if her duty to the military trumps her duty to her family, her community … and herself.
After some of the more grandiose films this Thanksgiving weekend, The Christmas Cup feels more like a back-to-basics Hallmark movie, with the focus on family and community, with a romance to cap things off. The concept of a competition to bring the community together is a cute one, even though some of the aspects of the games are questionable (like the egg nog chug). What really makes the movie work is the interplay between the Brandt family. Even though none of them look remotely related, the actors have a familial chemistry that allows us to buy into that fantasy. It is interesting that while the story concerns two neighboring towns, we never see Bridgeport. Everything takes place in Longleaf or the ‘neutral ground’ of the fire station. Bridgeport’s Mayor Steele, however, gives the impression that Bridgeport is a bit more high class than the blue collar community of Longleaf … or at least that is the impression she wants to give. The romance angle between Kelly and Quinn also develops naturally, even if it is at an advanced rate due to the short amount of time Kelly is expected to be in town, but she should have been up front with him from the beginning that they could not get into anything too serious since she was leaving January 1. When that date got pushed back, she became the ‘bad guy’ because she was just going to run off without saying anything to him. Luckily her conscience got the best of her, but she had a lot of backtracking and explaining to do to excuse the things she said to Bree about Quinn. It also makes things complicated for the audience — do we excuse Kelly’s words, knowing she was just trying to avoid hurting herself and Quinn? Should Quinn? It’s hard to get past hearing someone you have feelings for say you’re a stranger to them, even though you’ve spent days getting to know each other and sharing personal stories about your lives (Quinn was also released from his military duty due to a shoulder injury, so he and Kelly have a few things in common). Luckily, the actors actually play their emotions well enough that we want Kelly to tell Quinn how she feels, and we want Quinn to give her a second chance.
Hallmark Channel
Director Robin Dunne does a great job of making Longleaf look and feel like the small town you’d want to live in, and the four writers (four?!?) have crafted a collection of characters all with their own identities. There is nothing groundbreaking here, but it’s just a pleasant, completely idealized escape from our daily reality. The cast that has been assembled really helps bring the story to life.
Rhiannon Fish has the tough job of making Kelly a tough Marine, but she also has to have heart. Fish clearly shows that Kelly loves her family and her community, and while she generally keeps her heart guarded, just something about being home has made her a little less rigid. Fish shows how Kelly can take charge as she coaches her team, and she shows how warm she can be when she’s around Quinn. Ben Rosenbaum is also very good as Quinn, put in the impossible position of being a neutral party between the towns, never trying to show favor to one over the other, but when he become smitten with Kelly — and Rosenbaum shows that perfectly in the way he looks at Fish — his duty and his emotions begin to conflict, and the Bridgeport mayor seems to do anything she can to keep Quinn in check (he lives in Bridgeport, so she feels his loyalties should be to his town despite his neutral status). Both actors do a nice job of conveying the chemistry between Kelly and Quinn, and their growing feelings come across as developing naturally even though they’ve known each other for just a few days.
Michael Teigen is the sort-of comic relief as Mickey Brandt, an aspiring yet not-aspiring chef who creates cooking content with his daughter Kip for social media. He shows Mickey as a bit inept, claiming to be the ‘ingredients guy’ for the competition but unable to tell the difference between ginger and cinnamon in a blind challenge. But he always puts his heart into everything, and finds his true calling when the diner’s cook up and quits. Harlow Robbins is sweet as Kip, delivering her lines with total sincerity. Natasha Burnett is a bit reserved as Bree, occasionally showing some signs of emotion when speaking with Kelly, but really coming to life during the competition as she fires off a round of town trivia answers.Tetiana Ostapowych is perfectly over-the-top as Mayor Steele, making her the character you love to hate, hoping for her downfall in the competition (but she also gets to humanize the character a few times so it is a very well-rounded performance). Jonas Janz does a good job as the juvenile delinquent Duke, at first shown with a hard exterior that he slowly lets down and actually becomes a part of the team. He really shows Duke’s hurt, as well, when Kelly has to tell the team she has to leave before the competition. Jaeda Lily Miller is also quite funny as Starla, the girl with dreams bigger than her actual talent. She’s so good at being so bad that you actually hope she can shock everyone with an impeccable singing voice during the competition but … she never quite gets there and that also makes us feel sympathetic towards her thanks to Miller’s performance.
Overall, The Christmas Cup isn’t going to set the world on fire, but it is a lovely diversion, a bit of escapism during the holiday season, with a nice story and some really engaing actors bringing it all to life.
The Christmas Cup has a run time of 1 hour 24 minutes, is rated TV-G, and is streaming on Hallmark+.
Preview – The Christmas Cup
Hallmark Channel