Debbie Macomber's Dashing Through the Snow

K.T. Donaldson [not his real name—C.], 2015
Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 45%

It took me 20 minutes of searching to figure out what the name of this movie was so I could look it up on Rotten Tomatoes. The reason it took so long is that all I knew about it was that it came on the Hallmark Channel at some point in the last month and a half and that it was a Christmas movie. And, let me tell you, that doesn't narrow it down much.

I commented once before that at Christmastime, the Hallmark Channel "produces at least 600 movies a day". That was an exaggeration, but I find myself overwhelmed by the proliferation of these things. They are all dreadful, and everyone knows that, but people keep watching them—including me, apparently.

I'm not going to try to review this movie in earnest, because I've already admitted that I don't remember anything about it. I know it was about a woman called Ashley Harrison who, for some reason that escaped me, is suspected of being a drug smuggler or something. And it turns out the handsome dream-hunk she's sharing a rental car with on her trip up Interstate 5 is actually a government agent trying to bust her. Do they fall in love at the end? Does he discover that she's not really a criminal? Does she turn out to actually be a criminal? Your guess is as good as or better than mine.

One thing that did stand out to me was that the entire movie is set on the I-5 corridor, the largest and busiest freeway on the West Coast, with the characters traveling from San Francisco to Seattle. And yet, the road they're traveling on is clearly a tiny, two-lane highway through the middle of nowhere in what is obviously British Columbia. The dialogue goes to almost surreal lengths to draw attention to the fact that they're driving on the 5 (including a scene where the two main characters pointlessly discuss the history of the Interstate Highway System), almost as if they're proud of the job they've done at simulating the setting. At one point, they wander through a snowy mountain forest in Sacramento. Here is a photograph of the landscape along I-5 outside Sacramento:

And it doesn't snow there.

The only thing that makes a thing like this watchable is the seeming sincerity of the effort. I had the impression while watching this movie that they were trying to make something worth watching. They weren't trying very hard, but I think they were trying. That's what distinguishes it from such fare as Netflix has recently been churning out, which has a hipsterish ironic quality about it, like Sharknado but on a much lesser scale. I prefer honest incompetence. (Hence my somewhat halfhearted review of a recent Netflix release.)