Back during 70s, 80s, and 90s and into the early 2000s, ABC, NBC, or CBS used to have a new Christmas movie during the holiday season, usually showing up on a Sunday night somewhere between Thanksgiving weekend and mid December. Sometimes they were Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas movies, but mostly they were made for TV Christmas movies. For the most part, those movies had more thought and creativity put into them than most of what we see now on the Hallmark networks.
This movie reminded me of those movies much more than those Hallmark networks Christmas movies that we see now. It's a little "Groundhog Day", a little "The Family Man", some "Back to the Future", and a healthy helping of "Eve's Christmas", although there are original twists to this particular story. Lyndsy Fonseca, who just recently co-starred in the Disney Plus series "Turner and Hooch" does a great job as Angie as she travels 10 years into her past and then has to figure out what she needs to do to get back to the present. Along the way she learns things about the people she loves that she should have known if only she had opened her eyes to the world around her. Christopher Lloyd also puts on a nice performance as the ticketmaster/train conductor.
Yes, the last few minutes are predictable, but so what? It's not the destination that makes or breaks this movie, it's the journey that puts this movie quite a few notches above the standard Hallmark Channel Christmas movie and one that makes it well worth watching.
