The Knight Before Christmas spoilers is saying that a couple of weeks ago I was scrolling through my netflix coming soon list and found this trailer for a movie called “The Knight Before Christmas” a time traveling romance about a knight from the 14th century that comes to the modern day and falls in love with this girl, Brooke, played by Vanessa Hudgens. Honestly, as far as star players go, that is the only one I recognized in the film. That’s saying nothing of their ability, the cast was pretty good as far as netflix productions go. Even if the plot requires complete suspension of disbelief – that’s fine. It’s a fantasy-flavored holiday romance movie, the movie equivalent of a Christmas cookie. Let us dig in.
Love Conquers All Logic Be Damned! – A review of The Knight Before Christmas Starring Vanessa Hudgens!
The movie begins in England in the 14th century with a bunch of knights riding out for some sort of… contest. I don’t know, that part is really unimportant to the plot. We meet two brothers, Sir Cole Lyons (John Whitehouse) and Sir Geoffrey Lyons (Harry Jarvis) of Norwich. They’re going on this little half quest thingamabob right before Geoffrey gets knighted on Christmas day, of all days! Now, I don’t know about you but that seems kind of an odd, sacrilegious time to become a knight but my history lessons didn’t cover knighting ceremonies. Just for this article I have looked them up and they don’t mention specific days for knighthood so I guess in this universe it happens on Christmas. Oh well! We’ll suspend our disbelief and just pretend that the uber religious zealots around at the time wouldn’t have burned a few people at the stake for that.
Love Conquers All Logic Be Damned! – A review of the Knight Before Christmas
So Sir Cole is riding around on his fancy schmancy black steed (A fresian no less! Pretty!) having just discussed with his brother what they’re going to do to win this quest thingum… Whatever, it’s unimportant! When he meets this woman in the woods. The woman looks elderly so of course naturally he’s going to come up to her and address her with “Old Crone” (Ella Kenion) like any knight of his day. (You have to wonder about these period pieces if people actually talked like that or if they would slug you one if you actually addressed them that way.) She looks at him and asks him if he would help someone “as beautimous as I”, you have to admire her healthy self esteem.
Anyway so he offers to get her in out of the cold and she tells him that because of his kindness that the quest he’s sought for for many years will begin tonight. With the help of a magic, glowing, blue amulet and some woolooloo he’s dropped all the way from 14th century british Norwich into Bracebridge, Ohio which is just about as random as you can get. There he meets this young scienceteacher named Brooke who has given up on love and encourages everyone else that she’s privy to (including 8th grade girls) to do the same!
I don’t know if this would classify as your typical rom-com ‘meet cute’, but she accidentally runs him over with her car during a rather blinding snowstorm. Thankfully due to the armor he was wearing he was basically unhurt, but Brooke feels bad. So after an obligatory ER visit, she offers him to stay in her guest house instead of letting him stay at the police station. The doctors, officer, and Brooke all believe that he’s just a guy who got a head injury and lost his memory and in the real world that would be a totally logical explanation, but this is a place where earthly logic doesn’t seem to apply.
Cole has an interesting time adapting to modern technology, but doesn’t quite get how no one cooks and eats skunks anymore. Seriously, the man builds a fire on which to roast a skunk – again with the logic. Skunks are not native to England at all, or even Europe for that matter so I don’t think Cole would have known what it was, much less trusted it enough to consume it! But I guess hunger does strange things to people. Still, Brooke grabs a fire extinguisher and puts out his would-be bonfire then takes them out for a burger and fries. (Don’t even get me started on his weirdness with food.)
They have a cute ‘first date’ of sorts with some great comedic moments. Cole shows his age by referring to the server as a wench but thankfully Brooke quickly corrects him. He recovers quickly though! Her ex walks into the restaurant and almost ruins the entire thing. I have to admit I laughed when Cole offered to skewer the guy alive when he found out about his cheating, and they say chivalry is dead – not a Cole around! Once they get home, Cole is introduced to Alexa and shenanigans are had of the musical variety. He seems to be under the impression that Alexa can do anything at all and asks her to find his horse and get him home for his brother’s knighting ceremony. Not that that last bit is going to matter in the end but for right now we’ll pretend that it does.
They binge, what can only be assumed netflix, and then go Christmas tree hunting where he pulls the most awesome Christmas tree cutting move I’ve ever seen (seriously!), and then he goes around the Christmas castle harassing Mrs. Claus by referring to her as Old Crone because she has an amazing resemblance to the woman who sent him to the modern day in the first place but she’s not – or is she? Seems like her appearances changes every time he taps her on the shoulder so that question is never exactly answered. He displays a surprising amount of loyalty when he’s asked on a date by Brooke’s next door neighbor telling her that he’s otherwise engaged whereas a guy of the modern day would have jumped at the chance to keep his options open and hook up with another girl. Cole is bound by the code of Knighthood, which dictates that if a girl opens her home to him then he is obligated to stick with her. (The fact that she looks like Vanessa Hudgens has nothing to do with that, I’m sure.)
This is where the consistency gets a bit weird. They go to a supermarket where you would think he would be mystified by what to do but I guess a supermarket is still a ‘market’ and is kind of universal even to a medieval knight. He tries a bag of dinner rolls and declares them unfit for consumption telling her they ‘taste like a cocket’. I did some research (aka some googling on my phone) about what on earth he meant but it seems as if that just means ‘fine bread’, you would think that would be good enough for a medieval knight but no he wanted to show her how its done and make the bread himself. Hey, at least he’s offering to help with dinner!
They share a cute, warm moment while making bread and then her niece and little friend get lost in a nearby nature reserve while playing and Cole has to rely on his awesome knight skills to save them. Cole would be really great as a first responder, just saying. I’m not the only one that noticed that, he stops a purse snatcher and threatens not to let him keep his hands if he does it again. Officer Stevens (Arnold Pinnock) notices too and tells him that if he can pass a psych eval he has a chance of being on the force and Cole assures him that he will study night and day for this exam… hah wow. That is one exam where you just have to wing it, buddy!
So the big Christmas feast goes off without a hitch and they end up giving some less fortunate kids a nice Christmas which was heartwarming but ultimately unimportant to the plot. He gets an invitation to kiss under the mistletoe from Brooke’s red hot neighbor and in a refreshing turn of events instead of kissing the red-haired siren he respectfully abstains and she just gives him the mistletoe for ‘someone he really cares about’. They share their first kiss under the mistletoe and that’s when his medallion that the Old Crone gave him starts to glow, meaning that he fulfilled his quest. They share a goodbye at the spot where he appeared and he goes home leaving Brooke to mourn.
Cue a sad montage Brooke moping around without her knight in shining armor to this song that has to be royalty free. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing but literally none of the music in this production, not even the Christmas carols that the radio or alexa play are familiar to me. She finds the bean in the bean bread that Cole made and makes her Christmas wish, to have Cole back because of course she would, all this while holding a Christmas ornament he made her and crying. Meanwhile back in the 14th century Cole has shown up and his brother is ecstatic but then Cole realizes – about the same time as Brooke wishes on the bean – that he misses Brooke and belongs with her back in the modern day.
That’s when story falls apart completely. Instead of sticking around for the Knighting ceremony that was oh-so-important in the beginning of the story Cole tells Geoffrey of his tale of romance, of finding Brooke and missing her and now he wants to go back. And Geoffrey being the nice guy, (or perhaps extreme opportunist) that he is tells him to go and be with his lady and that making it to his knighting ceremony isn’t all that important after all. Like time travel is just something that happens in the 14th century every day and that his going off and being what would be called a military deserter by modern day terms wouldn’t earn him some dungeon time because hey, that’s logic! Or perhaps he was just that pissed that Cole worried him for the equivalent of a week and a half and made him worry that he was dead so Geoffrey is going to punk him by getting him thrown into the dungeon. Needless to say this is not how real siblings act – at all.
Whatever the case, Cole finds his way back to the future (haha no pun intended) via the Old Crone and this time he’s kind enough to bring his horse, Sherwyn along. He comes back to Brooke and tells her he realized all along that she was his quest (my my, such interesting verbiage for the modern day) and they kiss and ride off into the sunset together. When the credits roll we get an extra scene where the old crone meets his brother and gives him a glowing red amulet like the blue one that she gave Cole int the beginning. Epic foreshadowing? Maybe we’ll get a sequel? Who knows. Overall the movie was a fun jaunt into the fantasy Christmas genre. Half of it didn’t make sense but its fantasy so I was not expecting much.
I will say that the last part certainly hinted to what would be, at the very least, a curiosity inducing sequel. Some parts made me think that this would have made a better TV show or maybe a better mini-series (does anybody even do those things anymore?) than it did a standalone movie because there were parts that needed some continuity. Like the part where Brooke referenced Aldovia, apparently it was a reference to last year’s Christmas movie starring Hudgens The Princess Switch which I’m not sure that everyone saw, but I’m now tempted to watch. The only thing that really bothered me was the fact that close brothers didn’t act like close brothers at all but rather distant friends or maybe cousins if we’re sticking to the whole family narrative here. Also there was a line in there about how a knights first loyalty is to his quest and to his King but that’s just until a pretty enough damsel comes along according to the logic of this movie. Speaking of Damsels apparently he had his own lady back in the 14th century, a lady Matilda… who is only mentioned once and doesn’t seem to be getting in the way of any romance in the modern day so I guess he wasn’t that into her after all!
Part of the movie’s charm is that these two characters fall in love doing the most mundane things together. Like binge watching netflix or going to the grocery store or making bread. It doesn’t take something elaborate and fancy or overtly sexual to get these two to want each other and that’s one of the praises I’ll give it. You don’t see too many films like that nowadays. One could argue that its schmaltzy and a little hallmark-y in places but again, its a Christmas movie! I’ll give it props for being the kind of movie that you can watch with your 8 year old and your 85 year old Grandma without cringing in some parts. The world needs more fare like that.
Logic is not its strong suit, we don’t really know the Old Crone’s reasons for sending Cole on this particular quest. We don’t really know why Cole knew about Santa Claus considering that was a few centuries past his time, he would have known St. Nicholas however, which would have made more sense if he had made that reference instead of Santa. We don’t know why the knights were knighted on Christmas day because in medieval times this would have undoubtedly clashed with the birth of Christ and at the very least had some clergy of the day ruffled. We also don’t know how on earth Brooke’s niece managed to get a real live puppy for Christmas when no one in the house got it for her. Supposedly, this was due to the magic of Christmas. Christmas magic or not I would be checking my basement to see what else got in! The Grinch had a dog too, you know! Cute Christmas movie but if you’re after historical accuracy then maybe you need to stick to The History Channel.
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