One Royal Holiday

As you'll know if you've read my intro post, Aaron Tveit is my favourite actor and obviously because of this I like to stay up to date with his work. I've been putting off watching his latest movie One Royal Holiday (2020) for about 2 months now, and oh boy. I haven't been particularly excited for it which is why it's taken me this long to finally get round to watching it when it was released way back on October 31st (which is the most random night to release a Christmas movie, but whatever) I've seen Hallmark movies before so I knew it would be overly schmaltzy and cheesy, and the preview didn't give me much hope, but somehow it ended up being even worse?

Fairly typical for Hallmark holiday fare, it tells the story of Anna who works as a nurse in a Boston hospital and is visiting her father's Inn in Conneticut for the holidays, and Prince James of Galwick who's stuck in the US with his mother the Queen of Galwick after their plane was grounded due to snow storms. They meet in a donut shop and when learning of their plight Anna offers them a place to stay at her fathers Inn. Prince James has a massive stick up his ass and it's Anna's job to remove it, and typically they fall in love in the process.

I'd guessed Prince James's accent was going to be bad just from the preview when literally all he says is "Sorry, what?", but even I wasn't prepared for just how bad. Aaron has worked extensively with British people, he even worked on a London stage for a while, I also read an interview where he boasted about having received British accent training when filming Les Mis (a movie in which he sounds distinctly American I should add) so it feels like a real accomplishment to have gotten it that wrong. I guess now I understand why the Broadway production of Moulin Rouge randomly made Christian an American - our man just can't do accents.

I'm also perplexed at the characterisation of the Prince and Queen as they make such a point in the movie of saying that their fictional country of Galwick is 'Northern Europe' which to me, a European, implies Scandinavia. Yet everything about this 'Royal family' was the most painfully ignorant British stereotype you could ask for and had absolutely NOTHING to do with anything distinctly 'Northern Europe'. Even several of the casual comments they made about how 'different' they were got to me because it was just so poorly researched and could of been quickly Googled:
➳ "I'm not used to being on this side of the road" - the majority of Europe drives on the same side of the road as the US, driving on the left is literally a UK only thing.
➳ "I minored in architecture" - THAT'S NOT HOW EUROPEAN SCHOOLING WORKS!!!! We don't have 'majors' and 'minors'.
Even all of the comments on tea, and the 'royals' laughing at the Americans and their donuts - y'know we eat donuts here too, right??? Patisseries and bakeries are kind of a big deal, we invented most of that stuff.

I honestly found this film painful because it was just so poorly researched, so "haha, Europeans, am I right?" without having the slightest idea of anything to do with Europe and it came across as borderline offensive in it's level of ignorance. Both of the lead characters of Prince James and Anna aren't even likeable and were just equally as smug in opposite ways.

Aaron looked like he didn't want to be there for most of it, and he barely bothered promoting it on his social media so I feel like this is just something he signed up to in a panic caused by the pandemic and Broadway closing - he even directly said as much, making the point that it was the first work he'd been offered in months since Broadway closed. It honestly hurts to be ragging on one of his movies like this because he is my favourite actor and usually watching his movies makes me so, so happy, but it was so genuinely terrible and such a disappointment as it's the first of his movies that I actually feel that way about.