'All I Need For Christmas' Hallmark Mystery Review: Stream It Or Skip It?

Some Hallmark holiday movies are fantastic, funny, and delightful, while others seem so mired in clichés, it’s as if they written by AI. The new Hallmark Mystery film All I Need For Christmas is so densely packed with themes we’ve seen before that it falls into the latter category. While the film is not terrible by any stretch, it definitely makes the case that, with 43 titles on Hallmark’s Countdown To Christmas list, maybe next year they could pare it down in favor of quality over quantity.

ALL I NEED FOR CHRISTMAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman names Maggie Mackenzie (Mallory Jansen) strums her guitar onstage at a bar singing “Here We Come A-Wassailing,” an inspired choice for a folksy acoustic guitar player such as herself.

The Gist: Jolly as her caroling may seem, things aren’t going great for Maggie. After her performance, her manager Lewis dumps all kinds of bad news on her. She’s been kicked off an upcoming tour where she was supposed to be the opening act, and Lewis expects her to use all that new free time she has to write a big hit song, encouraging her to use software called Archline, which is like an AI songwriting tool. But Maggie ain’t here for that, she’s an artist. She drives a VW bus and uses a flip phone! No apps for her! But alas, Lewis is basically like, it’s 2024, babe, act like it. With nowhere else to go, she heads back to her family’s Christmas tree farm upstate to wallow for a while.

MEANWHILE, in the big city… Archer (Dan Jeannotte) and his sister Piper, the two children of a wealthy businessman, are having their father’s will read out by a lawyer. Their father pitted brother and sister against one another for their whole lives, and upon his death, Archer learns that all of his father’s wealth has gone into a trust for his sister’s children, and a seat on the board of their company will be awarded to whoever has the highest net worth AS OF 12:01AM on Christmas morning. How specific a deadline! Though it’s not yet Christmas, Piper declares that she’s the winner, making a big, braggy scene about it and throwing her net worth in Archer’s face. (Succession, but make it Hallmark!) Archer is more like the black sheep of his family though, he actually has a heart and is disappointed that his only living relative sucks so bad. To get away from it all, he hightails it north to… the very same town that Maggie lives in. Oh, and you should all know that Archer isn’t a total failure, in fact he’s the creator of Archline, the aforementioned music app that Maggie refuses to acknowledge.

All Archer wants to do is buy a Christmas tree to stick in his rental cabin, make cinnamon rolls and enjoy a quiet holiday, but he immediately makes an enemy of Maggie by simply mentioning the music software he makes. Maggie spends an unreasonable portion of the movie hating him and making him feel bad about everything he does as a result. And for what it’s worth, Archer isn’t supposed to be Mr. Corporate America, he’s actually just a nice guy saddled with an awful family. He describes being brought up in what sounds like a dystopian, capitalist household where his parents would pit him and Piper against each other every year to see which child could make more money, and the loser wouldn’t get any Christmas presents. Things grow even more complicated when Piper and her kids actually show up at the cabin unannounced to celebrate the holiday. On the one hand, Archer is happy to reconnect with her, but on the other, old habits die hard, and Piper is as competitive and mean as ever.

Once Maggie starts to understand Archer’s backstory, she realizes that she’s been judging him too harshly. She slowly agrees to the idea of using one of his new apps that helps kids learn music help her with the youth Christmas choir performance she’s been directing. She also agrees to let Archer film the kids’ performance for a livestream on a new app he developed, and asking if she’ll also debut her new music that way too. Maggie comes around to his technology, realizing it’s not all evil, and discovers that, hey, maybe it’ll even help her career… and of course she and Archer realize that despite their differences, someone’s gotta kiss at the end.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Yet another You’ve Got Mail-style romance about a twee woman set in her quaintly old-fashioned ways, refusing to make room in her life for a CEO…until one day, she does.

Our Take: I have no problem with Hallmark movies that retread old ground, in this case, the trope is the female protagonist (whether a small business owner, artist, or what have you) who refuses to have her habits disrupted by a savvy corporate-type from the big city. But the twist here is that Archer isn’t greedy or a workaholic, and he’s actually trying to shy away from the values his parents instilled about the power and influence of money and winning. What’s annoying is how long the film takes for Maggie to realize that. Her constant judgment – even in the film’s final moments, when she accuses Archer of using her to promote his new app, feels harsh.

Maybe it’s the fact that the film makes Maggie so close-minded for so long, or that it makes Piper such a raving, competitive loon for so much of the film (so much so that it seems like her kids can’t stand her), but there were large chunks of the movie that I actively disliked because everyone was being so unreasonably mean. While, of course, everyone is going to be copacetic by the end because this is Hallmark, that’s also why so much of the film irked me – in these films, people usually turn over their new leaf faster than that. Maybe the network has conditioned me to expect certain story beats to play out at the same pace every time, but unfortunately, neither the story nor most of the characters hit for me in this one.

Parting Shot: After Maggie performs her new song, she and Archer kiss.

Performance Worth Watching: Dan Jeannotte plays Archer in a way that he – the character you assume the worst about because the man with the corner office always represents ambition and greed – is the most empathetic person in this whole story. That’s because, surprise!, he’s none of those things, he’s actually a victim of the behavior and judgment of everyone else around him, including Maggie.

Memorable Dialogue: “It teaches them music, Maggie, there’s nothing in there that’s going to become sentient and take over the world,” Archer tells Maggie about the new app he developed to help kids learn how to identify different music notes.

Our Call: All I Need For Christmas has some nice moments, but it’s a largely forgettable variation on a theme we’ve seen a dozen times before. In a crowded sea of holiday movies, you can 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.