Plot Summary
John Dale is all alone this holiday season, so he wants to manufacture his Christmas by going to a random store and ordering them to buy all kinds of things that are necessary for him to enjoy an artificial holiday experience, including paying off people from the local ‘actors guild’ to play along with his games. Will they be able to put together his borrowed Christmas before it gets too late?
Production Quality (1 point)
From the ridiculous opening sequence to the end, this production is very cheap-looking. While camera work and video quality are fine, the audio quality has a lot of issues, including dead portions and unnecessary background noises. The soundtrack is also a cheesy Christmas one. The sets, props, and locations are also very limited and underwhelming. Finally, there is really no editing to speak of as all of the content is just presented at face value. In short, there is really not much good to say about this movie as a whole because it seems like most of the time that it is trying its best to not be interesting.
Plot and Storyline Quality (0 points)
Besides the absurd Christmas premise, The Borrowed Christmas is probably the most anti-conflict film we have ever seen, Christmas or not. The story is very boring, childish, and extremely contrived. Even so, there are strange attempts to be overly dramatic for no reason at all. Also, the characters come off as extremely cheesy and plastic due to bubbly and overly happy dialogue. It’s really hard to understand how this idea even came to be, especially due to the fact that there is basically no conflict to drive this plot. Thus, the story really has no clear purpose and only comes off as a silly church play. Even though there may be some good ideas here, they are not presented properly at all.
Acting Quality (1 point)
For the most part, this cast is dry and generic, as well as too theatrical at times. While they are fine at times, there are also some laughably random outbursts throughout. Another unfortunate negative to note is some poorly done makeup. However, not all is bad here, even though this movie still lacks overall purpose.
Conclusion
The Borrowed Christmas is basically a lesson in how to make a movie that completely lacks conflict. Even most Hallmark movies have more conflict than this one—it’s kind of a requirement for plot writing. Alas, especially in holiday films, story writing continues to suffer as it is substituted for silly and trite holiday ideas. The time has come to move past these sorts of conventions and truly make a difference in the film world. At least Chip Rossetti and his team showed improvement after the creation of this film.
Final Rating: 2 out of 10 points
Box Office Revolution 
I happened to enjoy this movie. I was hoping for a sequel. Not everyone needs conflict in a movie. I would rather watch a clean wholesale movie with my family.
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I thought it was a good, clean and faith based movie! Some of us do not want to see conflict as the main story line in a film. Those rating the movie are probably the very ones that give 5 stars to R rated trash that I don’t watch much less let my kids!
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From what I can tell, the borrowed christmas… Er… borrowed heavily from another holiday film called Surviving Christmas. It seems the production got a bit lazy as they failed to notice Surviving Christmas was a major flop. Couldn’t they have stolen a better film?
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Thanks for pointing that out. It looks like a very uncanny correlation. I agree, surely there are better ideas to use than this, especially since there’s basically no conflict in The Borrowed Christmas.
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