The second of three movies, to date, featuring the character of Miranda Chester, A Family For The Holidays (aka Engaging Father Christmas, which makes more sense when sandwiched between Finding Father Christmas and Marrying Father Christmas) is your typical comfort viewing for this time of year. Which means that it is so simple and lightweight that you can easily watch it, as I did, without being aware of the movie preceding it. Oh, the completist in me will eventually watch the other movies in this seasonal trilogy, but things are covered here by a character in the first main scene uttering a sentence that summarises Finding Father Christmas.
So let's dive in. Miranda (Erin Krakow) is heading back to the small town of Carlton Heath to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, Ian (Niall Matter), and spend some time with her new-found family. It was only last year that Miranda started to enjoy Christmas, you see, when she found out all about her real father, first visited Carlton Heath, and fell in love with Ian. On the way to Carlton Heath, Miranda bumps into an ex-boyfriend, Josh (Andrew Francis). She tells him about the deceased father, now deceased, that she found out about since last time they spoke. Unbeknownst to any of the main characters, Steve Decker (Ben Wilkinson) is also heading to Carlton Heath. He's a reporter who hopes to make an impact with an exclusive story.
Director David Winning has a decent body of work under his belt, most of them being TV movies, and he handles the material here well enough. The script, by David Golden, who wrote all three movies in the trilogy (based on books by Robin Jones Gunn), is the work of someone equally at ease with giving viewers what they expect from these movies. There's a small mystery element, for the first half of the movie anyway, and a decent amount of tension causing the leading lady to stress out as things look increasingly gloomy on the way to a last-minute turnaround that viewers will all know is coming from the very first scenes.
Krakow is just fine in the lead role, and she's paired up with a typically safe and sweet male in the shape of Matter, who remains convincingly lovely and understanding throughout. Francis is let off the hook, and is enjoyable enough, playing someone who could have easily been the big villain of the piece, and Wilkinson pops up often enough to remind you that he's up to something. Wendie Malick is a bit of a highlight, playing the wife of the deceased father figure. Her character is simply okay, but I have to admit that I was just pleased whenever she came onscreen, recognising her from many other roles she has had in her lengthy and varied career.
While this may be slightly lower-tier than many other Christmas TV movies I have watched over the years (and anyone who knows me will know that I watch a LOT of them), I am still going to eventually check out the films on either side of it. So it wasn't that bad. It was just average, as so many of these things are.
5/10
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