Plot Summary
Maggie has always hated Christmas ever since her father left the family during the holiday season. Ever since then, she’s sought to control everything around her, especially her young son’s life. However, when his grades begin dropping, she is forced to entrust him to the care of an after-school tutor, but Maggie soon finds that she isn’t like what she expected from a tutor. Will she decide to open up her heart over the holiday season to love again?
Production Quality (2.5 points)
As expected, Maggie’s Christmas Miracle is a typically fine Hallmark production with good video quality and camera, as well as good audio quality. The soundtrack is predictably generic but not as bad as usual. The sets, locations, and props are fine, but the Christmas decor is expectedly overwhelming and beyond belief. Further, the editing is average, and thus, everything in this production is standard and expected from the Hallmark assembly line of Christmas films.
Plot and Storyline Quality (1 point)
Though Hallmark movies are always better when using source material, especially from authors like Karen Kingsbury, there are still plenty of typical elements in Maggie’s Christmas Miracle. While Karen Kingsbury characters run circles around typical Hallmark fare, there are still a lot of cheesy feel-good elements throughout this plot. However, the dialogue is mostly good enough to develop character motive and personality, even if the plot is extremely predictable with a cookie-cutter romance plot where two people who don’t like each other at first are thrown together at Christmastime. The story includes all the expected turns and conventions, and all of the stereotypes are too easily fallen into. Since this is a character-based plot, we needed to see deeper character growth than this, and we also would have liked to see relationship twists and turns that were more based on past and present personality and behavior issues rather than on unrealistically stupid miscommunication problems (see The Bridge). Unfortunately, the story gets worse as it goes on as cheap Christian messages are awkwardly inserted and end up hurting any good portions of dialogue there may be. Essentially, the source material is helping this plot to be more than it would otherwise be, but there’s still a lot more that could have been accomplished here.
Acting Quality (2 points)
As expected, the casting and acting of this film is mostly professional with typical Hallmark elements, such as some overdone makeup. For the most part, the line delivery and the emotions are natural, but there are some portions that are a bit too sappy. However, as a whole, this cast is professional enough to know what they’re doing and to produce an above-average performance.
Conclusion
If Hallmark only used books and true stories as source material from here until eternity, the channel would be a much better place for it. However, this is highly unlikely to happen. Even still, there is enough good in Maggie’s Christmas Miracle to make it a passable holiday film to watch if you want a safe, benign movie that’s not too old and not too cheesy. Also, if you like Karen Kingsbury novels, this film is definitely for you.
Final Rating: 5.5 out of 10 points
Box Office Revolution 