"Falling for Christmas" marks Lohan's return and Netflix's biggest Hallmark Christmas Movie clone

Falling for Christmas (2022)

Lindsay Lohan has been long overdue for a new star vehicle to make her official comeback. For now, it’s “Falling for Christmas,” a Netflix-released snowball of fluff seemingly made by a Hallmark Christmas Movie™ algorithm, but perhaps this could be a stepping stone to something better. It is a smart move on Lohan’s part, considering the former child star looks fabulous and proves she hasn’t lost her comedic chops. The movie itself is par for the course minus starring Candace Cameron Bure or Lacey Chabert (Lohan’s “Mean Girls” co-star!), meaning it’s also clunky, cornball, inoffensive, and insipid holiday schmaltz. Alas, we should be trying to stifle our tears and audible "aww-ing," not trying to control our eyes from rolling.

For an easy comp, “Falling for Christmas” is “Overboard” for the holidays. Lohan plays a uselessly spoiled hotel heiress named Sierra Belmont. Just as her father, Beauregard (Jack Wagner), wants her to be a part of the business, Sierra’s dopey influencer boyfriend Tad Fairchild (George Young) takes her skiing and ends up proposing to Sierra on the top of a mountain. Once a nasty wind pushes Sierra down the mountain—and Tad gets sent to the pits of hell, er, stranded in the forest before finding an ice fisherman—she bonks her head. If she froze to death, we’d have no movie, so somebody ends up coming to her rescue. That somebody is struggling mountain lodge owner Jake Russell (Chord Overstreet), a handsome and charming widower with a cloying, endlessly cheerful moppet daughter (Olivia Perez) and the sweetest, most gentle mother-in-law (Alejandra Flores). When Sierra wakes up in the hospital, she can’t even remember her name. Have no worry, Jake takes in the beautiful amnesiac, setting her up in a spare room at his lodge. And, well, Sierra (she temporarily goes by “Sarah”) learns life skills like making her own bed, cooking eggs, and doing laundry because she can’t do anything for herself, and then by Christmas miracles, she might even fall in love with [redacted for spoilers]. 

So cozy and innocuously directed by Janeen Damian, “Falling for Christmas” almost plays like a parody of a Hallmark Christmas Movie, except it’s utterly earnest. The script by Jeff Bonnett and Ron Oliver is so manufactured as if written during a game of Mad Libs. We are led to believe that Jake, despite having bumped into Sierra at the movie's start and spilling his coffee all over her "Valenagi" designer dress, does not recognize her when finding her unconscious or thereafter. There’s even a Santa Claus figure with perfect veneers to make sure Jake’s daughter's wish comes true and these crazy kids can fall in love. For dramatic effect, Jake keeps the angel topper for his and his wife's Christmas tree in a drawer. It should be said, however, that expectations are startlingly tilted exactly one time during the story’s 11th hour with what happens next for the incredibly vapid Tad.

It would seem like there’s a lot of pleasure taken in making fun of “Falling for Christmas,” and while it’s certainly hard to resist, one wishes Lindsay Lohan well in a movie that isn’t pleased to settle for paint-by-numbers mediocrity. Lohan has been missed on screen, and she is appealing here as Sierra/Sarah, registering a little more depth and emotion than this material deserves, quite frankly. When she gets the chance to perform comedy, it’s mostly for some lame, silly physical gags, like getting scared by a raccoon at her window and flipping over a recliner, or getting trapped in a fitted bedsheet. Lohan does at least get in a “Mean Girls” nod by singing “Jingle Bell Rock” for a spell. What does seem to be missing is much chemistry with a lot of her co-stars. She and Chord Overstreet (who played the charmingly guileless Sam “Trouty Mouth” Evans in TV’s “Glee,” which did have a place for Lohan in one episode as a glee club celebrity judge) have a very chaste romance. It doesn’t run too deep, despite both sharing a void in their lives (he lost his wife, and she lost her mother), but both actors at least make this more tolerable than it should be.

One winter-set movie annoyance that “Falling for Christmas” does get right is that we can actually see the actors’ breath outside. To compensate, a lot of over-lighting, noticeable green screen work, bad extras, and a little shameless Netflix counter-programming get in the way. By the standards of most Hallmark Channel-level fare around this time of year, “Falling for Christmas” is a saccharine piffle. It isn’t completely heart-winning, but there is comfort in watching an aggressively cute, perfectly unremarkable background filler while wrapping presents and baking cookies. In fact, this is the equivalent of a bland sugar cookie. If that’s all you want for Christmas, you definitely get it here.

Grade: C

Netflix is releasing “Falling for Christmas” (93 min.) to stream on November 10, 2022.