Movie Review: She's Making a List (2025)
Synopsis: Isabel takes her job as an inspector for Santa's naughty-or-nice list seriously and is in line for a promotion. However, when doing a re-evaluation of Charlie, an 11-year-old girl on the naughty list, she falls for Charlie's widowed father, Jason, and breaks a number of rules by dating him. As she puts her job in jeopardy, Isabel realizes there is a lot of gray area between naughty and nice and begins to question the overall system.
Who's in it? The movie stars Lacey Chabert, Andrew W. Walker, Cadence Compton, Steve Bacic and Louriza Tronco.
Review: My wife and I still haven't found much time to do our annual Hallmark Christmas movie watching but since we were both home at a reasonable hour this evening, I convinced her to at least watch Lacey Chabert's latest film. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite the magical film we were hoping for.
One common complaint I have with films is many get ruined by trying to do too much. This film, ironically, felt like it had the opposite problem. It had an idea that was potentially interesting, but it was also something that needed to be filled out a whole lot more than it was. As much as my wife and I love Chabert in films like this, she wasn't enough to fix that.
I think the biggest problem I had with this film was the overall concept was kind of creepy if you put any thought into it. Isabel (Chabert) and her coworkers weren't elves, and they didn't work for Santa. They were humans that worked for a company that outsourced its services to Santa. So, basically, it was a private corporation that spent the entire year spying on and recording every child in the world. It sounds much more like the plot of a horror film than a romantic comedy and, in real life, it sounds like something horribly illegal.
And don't even get me started on Jason (Walker). Isabel was clearly spying on his child but he both falls for her "works for the electric company" excuse and immediately asks her out on a date. Who does that? There's meet cute and then there's movie relationships that just feel forced from the start. This was the latter and made even less sense when he realized she was posing as a parking enforcement officer earlier in the film. Plus, don't even get me started about the idea of a career-minded woman willing to give up everything she worked so hard to get because she has the hots for a single dad she just met (for all she knew, he could have murdered his wife).
I was also admittedly confused about how Jason was able to support his daughter. His backstory of being a former food critic who was making amends by helping the restaurants he trashed seemed nice, but it was very unclear if he was getting paid to help them (which undermines the whole redemption arc) or was doing it for free. It honestly made me question if his interest in Isabel was financially motivated and he was just looking for someone with a good paying job.
One thing that might have helped this movie would have been more focus on her boss, Rudolph (Bacic) and his desire to leave the naughty-or-nice list solely up to an AI algorithm. Instead, that confrontation and resolution were rushed in my opinion, with the movie missing out on the opportunity to build it up a bit more because Isabel took way too long to figure out Charlie (Compton) didn't belong on the naughty list.
Good thing they had Santa (Dax Belanger) to save the day at the last second so the movie at least had a happy ending.
Final Opinion: It was an interesting idea, but between the whole spying on children thing and the failure to capitalize on one of the more intriguing plot points, the film just misses the mark. It's not a terrible movie, it's just not memorable.
My Grade: C-
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Here are some reviews of other Lacey Chabert Hallmark movies:
Movie Review: Christmas at Castle Hart (2021)
Movie Review: The Dancing Detective: A Deadly Tango (2023)
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