The Santa Squad

It's a Lifetime movie, so my score is relative (we aren't using The Godfather scale here). The first 3/4 of the movie was pretty decent, the writing wasn't horrible, all actors were actually quite good. It's a cheesy Christmas video with zero budget, but the show was making the most of what they had. That is until the turn. All these movies follow the same general formula; two people, one of who is usually in a bad relationship, find each other, but before the soulmates can be together, some contrived plot device causes one to mistakenly reject the other. In the end, the truth is revealed, and true love wins the day. Usually, it's a conniving ex that causes all the trouble, but here, it's quite possibly the dumbest reason in all of Christmas romance TV history. I won't "spoil" it, but either the original writer, who was fairly competent to this point, went completely off the rails, or the script was hacked and butchered by a person who has never set foot in a kitchen, let alone baked a cookie. And who then decided that the main characters suffered temporary brain damage and completely lost their short term memory. I was half expecting the lead to pull some Polaroids out of her pocket so she could remember what happened two minutes prior.... Anyway, had it not been for that horrendous bit of script, this show might have ranked as one of the better low budget Lifetime efforts. As it is, I'm going with a very painful, 6 out of 10.