Gotta admit, I was worried when I started this movie up. No, not because Mark Jean directed it. I was worried because it was written by Nancey Silvers. Nancey Silvers is the one who brought us the scripts for A Country Wedding and The Color Of Rain. But, it turned out to be decent.

The movie opens up and we meet Zachary Stone played by Brandon Routh. Yep, the abandoned 2006 Superman himself. The firehouse he works at is putting together one of those hunk calendar things. Even the photographer hits on him.

Now we meet Marilee White (Kimberly Sustad). She’s a veterinarian student and works at a pet store.

He finds a cat named Ambrose. She is a cat lover herself, but her landlady has a strict no pet policy so she has to hide it. Although we don’t see the bar graph for it like we did in The Wish List, it does look like there’s a high probability she’s going to eat a whole tub of ice cream.

They meet at a grocery store and either I’m going crazy and seeing it everywhere at this point, or that is the boom mic popping in from the top of the frame.

There honestly isn’t much to this story. I mean there is some product placement like this.

They make sure you get a good look at that Folgers coffee. There’s also this rather unfortunate line.

Finally, trying to figure out where this movie is supposed to take place and this shot not helping matters.

Some shots will say Portland and others will say Jamestown. Luckily, the filmmakers left in this shot…

in case we really wanted to know this was shot in Fort Langley, British Columbia, Canada. Or at least that one scene was done there.

Otherwise, what you have here is a straightforward, but well acted enough standard Hallmark romance. Just add cats. I mean he’s dating a girl who’s a stuck up female dog. She’s tossed aside pretty quickly. Marilee’s friend does put her on a dating site, but they don’t do anything with that. They keep spending time together, so do their cats, and eventually they end up together.

Well, there is this with the dating site.

Uh, doesn’t that mean she has selected she is a man? I mean given there is no other part to that profile page that indicates her gender and it is above the “Looking for a:” box.

There’s really only one problem I had. This film kind of ends, but still has running time left. She hangs up some mistletoe hoping for a kiss from him. He cleverly pretends to not see it for a bit, then swoops in and kisses her. They are already living together at this point. The movie should end there, but it doesn’t. Instead, she mistakenly thinks he went out with some blonde, they’re apart for a bit, and then they find each other again. It should have ended on the kiss, whether that meant stopping the film where it occurred or moving that scene later into the film. It’s an unnecessary last minute speed bump.

That’s a minor complaint. There isn’t anything special here, but I liked the two leads and believed they actually liked each other. This movie even did the moving focus from one actor to another pretty much right. You’d think that is a given, but not in Hallmark movies. Sometimes they move the focus too slow and it gives you time to dwell on the change when there’s no reason to. This movie doesn’t do that.

Sorry there isn’t more to say. At least we can leave it on a shot that makes Brandon Routh look like he’s a psycho with a sign that says “Merry Christmas” behind him!