People have been describing “My Secret Santa” (a title that doesn’t even make sense, by the way) as the “reverse ‘Mrs. Doubtfire.'”
To that I say: just go watch “Mrs. Doubtfire.”
My list of notes, observations, and questions was by far the longest for this movie, which stars Alexandra Breckenridge as Taylor Jacobsen, a single mom (and former teen rock star, somehow), who decides her daughter must go to an exorbitantly expensive snowboarding school at a ski resort, and the only job she can find requires dressing up as an old man to become the resort’s resident Santa Claus.
Along the way, she meets a man, Matthew (Ryan Eggold), who is quite determined to get to know her — for truly no reason besides the fact that she’s pretty — but, gasp, he turns out to be the resort owner’s son.
This might all sound pretty normal, but believe me, this movie seems like it was written backward. As in, since they needed Taylor to have access to some of the best prosthetics since “Frankenstein,” her brother and his husband happen to be obsessed with Halloween.
Also, Taylor was just really bad at being Santa for too much of the runtime.
This brings me to the villain, Natasha, as played by Tia Mowry. She’s hyper-competent, dedicated to her job, and has been at the resort for years. But when it’s time for someone to get a promotion, Matthew the Nepo Baby gets it instead. Was I supposed to not root for her as she tried to sabotage his (quite poor) attempts at running things? Because I did not! She deserved the promotion!
Ultimately, this movie is deranged (but not in a fun way), the two leads have no chemistry, and it makes the cardinal sin of evoking a much better movie. It was a skip from me.
