A Review of Homeless for the Holidays

I was given the movie Homeless For the Holidays to review and my post is due this week. I am not required to give a positive review but rather an honest one and so here is the basic plot with my thoughts:

Jack Baker is a self-made executive who lives an upper-middle-class life–until he loses his job, and finds himself working at a burger restaurant to make ends meet. To make things worse, ends are not being met, and, if something doesn’t change soon, his family could lose everything by Christmas. (taken from this Wikipedia entry)

This is a very family friendly movie. I think many will easily relate to the “rat-race” and the tensions that are created in a marriage and a family from over-working at the expense of the family. It has a great lesson, stacked with morals and values and offers valuable takeaways to all viewers.

That said, I do not think this this movie is targeted for people like me and my demographic. In all honesty, I had a hard time watching it for a number of reasons. One, I did not appreciate the protagonist (Jack Baker). I didn’t really care for his acting, the writing was very cliched, and after a while I just kept being annoyed. Second I had a hard time with the dynamics with the Baker’s marriage. Almost as if it were stolen from a sitcom, the husband was a stubborn, weak loser which forced the wife to be more like a football coach trying to get her husband psyched up for the big game of “job-hunting” in this case. I didn’t really see them pursuing the solution together.

Though I don’t think I have really ever watched one, it seemed like the type of family-friendly movie that would go on the Hallmark channel and if the husband cheated on his wife and abused her, then the Lifetime channel. You will have to pardon my bias towards these movies, I simply don’t watch them.

STILL, for those looking for a family friendly movie and hate everything coming out of Hollywood, you may be in luck here. There is no cursing, no violence or inappropriate situations. And there is a great lesson to be learned here – that life is not all about great careers, a nice home and good-living but about much more.

For those interested, I encourage you to click on the movie’s homepage and watch the preview.

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