Stream It Or Skip It?

We’re halfway through Christmas in July on the Hallmark Channel, can you believe it? This week’s holiday fare includes Unwrapping Christmas: Lily’s Destiny, the third film in the Unwrapping Christmas series about four best friends who run a gift-wrapping store and each have their own romances pop up at the holidays. Here’s how this week’s entry stacks up to the rest.

Opening Shot: Outside, it’s a winter wonderland. We see a montage of snow-covered homes, wreaths, and twinkling lights all over town. Inside her home, Lily (Ashley Newbrough), sits at her laptop watching old home movies of her dad at Christmas.

The Gist: Lily’s a little sad at this time of the year because her dad died last year. Which might explain why she hasn’t decorated the tree assigned to her for the annual Festival of Trees that her high-strung neighbor Whitney runs. Lily’s bare tree is bringing Whitney down, but Lily has a lot on her plate besides just her grief. She co-owns a gift-wrapping store with her three best friends and this is their busiest time of year. She mentors a business school student named Kenzie (Martina Ortiz Luis). She’s also agreed to be interviewed by a writer named Sean (Torrance Coombs) for a local magazine to promote the shop, and she’s got a hot date with St. Paul’s most eligible bachelor, a realtor named Owen Mansfield, whose face is on billboards all over town.

Lily’s horoscope for the day predicts that something great is about to come her way, and since her date with Owen is coming up, she assumes that might be the thing. But it turns out, Owen is a self-absorbed jerk. The man who was interviewing her for the local magazine, Sean, is the one she really hits it off with.

Even though sparks were definitely flying with Sean, Lily accepts a second date with Owen just to see if he’s as bad as she thinks he is. While out at the restaurant, she spots Sean with another women. Throughout the film, Lily and Sean wrongly assume the other is dating someone else, and keep each other at arm’s length, though they are constantly running into each other or finding reasons to be in touch.

It isn’t until Whitney’s tree festival that they come together to help decorate the venue and explain themselves to each other. They realize that all of their assumptions about each other were wrong, and finally realize that they’re meant to be.

Our Take: I wanted to like Lily’s Destiny — Ashley Newbrough is a really solid actress who brings charm and authenticity to her (many) Hallmark roles and I really enjoy watching her. Similarly, Torrance Coombs made for a charming, warm leading man and their characters had real chemistry. But the film felt a little overcooked, if that’s possible. While some movie plots feel thin or don’t have enough going on, Lily’s Destiny has entirely too many things going on.

In the previous two Unwrapping Christmas films, we’ve watched the four friends at the gift-wrap shop prepare for the big charity gala in town, but in this one, not only is the gala looming, but Lily also helps her intern organize a cocktail party to drum up interest for the gala, there’s the tree decorating event organized by the truly unhinged and over-emotional Whitney, and there are also a couple instances of mistaken identity or misdirection to add to it all. It’s not that it’s hard to follow, it’s that it feels like the movie is trying to be all the things. The holiday spirit these films are meant to evoke is weighted down by how how many opportunities there are for misunderstandings to spring up or require Lily to problem solve. By the time we make it to the (expected) happy ending, it just feels like we had to work hard to get there.

Parting Shot: At the big Christmas gala, Sean and Lily dance together. He asks her to spend New Year’s Eve together and they kiss. “Finally,” Kenzie, Lily’s intern says, as she looks on, filming their romantic moment with Lily’s old camcorder.

Performance Worth Watching: As Owen, Franco Lo Presti is perfectly smug and smarmy, a modern-day Gaston who thinks highly of himself and thinks of his winks and smiles as currency.

Memorable Dialogue: After breaking up with Owen and wrongfully assuming Sean is taken, Lily sighs, “I guess I’ll be all alone under the mistletoe… again! There’s always next year.”

Our Call: As charming as some of the performances are in this film, as much as I wanted to like it more, Unwrapping Christmas: Lily’s Destiny isn’t one of the all-time greats. SKIP IT.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.