Christmas with a Prince

As it turns out, there are so many of these festive romcoms with “Christmas” and “prince” in the title that it took me three tries to find the right one when I was googling the movie to make sure I had the name right. Christmas with a Prince was released in 2018 as a TV movie. I decided to try this movie because Netflix’s blurb said it was about a pediatrician, and I’m working my way through all the medical dramas I can find. However, I forgot that children in a hospital in a holiday movie can only be used for one purpose: Inspiration¹, with a capital I. On that note, let’s go ahead and jump into this stirring and romantic story.

¹Inspirational children say things like “It’s okay that I’m not getting any presents this year; the most important thing is that we’re all together as a family” while smiling beatifically. They also joyfully give away their toys and warm winter clothing to children even more disadvantaged than them.

[Spoilers from here on.]

Our cast of characters includes Dr. Tasha (Kaitlyn Leeb), a pediatrician in charge of a children’s cancer ward; her brother Jeff (Josh Dean), a nurse in her department; and Prince Alexander (Nick Hounslow), a prince. When Prince Alexander breaks his leg in a skiing accident, he needs somewhere to recover out of the public eye. Fortunately, his old school friend Jeff works at a conveniently located hospital and arranges to hide the prince in Tasha’s pediatric ward, where no one will be looking for him. Jeff and Tasha convince the Very Mean chief of medicine to let the prince stay at their hospital by telling her there will be a substantial donation made to the hospital. This all happened in the first ten minutes, and I decided it was enough for me to predict the rest of the movie.

From here, Tasha and Alexander will (obviously) fall in love, brought together by the darling children under Tasha’s care. Alexander, who starts out as a self-absorbed prince, will win over Tasha’s heart by bonding with the kids. He’ll be drawn to her by the care and concern she shows her patients. Except that after they realize that they like each other, the prince finds out that he’s allegedly promised to give a lot of money to the hospital, and he’s done no such thing. He accuses Tasha of pretending to like him only to get his money. She denies it, but it’s too late; he leaves the hospital and returns to his royal friends and family. Tasha confronts Jeff, who admits that he made up the money thing just to get the chief of medicine to agree to let Alexander stay. Now Tasha has to go after the prince, explain everything, and make a public declaration of her love, which Alexander accepts, and they skip off into his castle together (because there has to be a castle somewhere in a Hallmark-esque Christmas movie, doesn’t there?).

In actuality, there’s arguably even less that happens in the movie than in my prediction. Alexander, of course, is a favorite of the delightfully precocious children under Tasha’s care, playing with them and getting to know them during his stay at the hospital. Tasha, it turns out, had a crush on the prince when they were at school together, and now that she sees he’s not completely self-centered, finds herself liking him again. When Alexander heals enough to leave the hospital, he asks if Tasha will join him at a fancy Christmas party. She agrees, but just then a woman shows up claiming to be Alexander’s fiancée. He explains she’s not, and they go to the event, where this woman bizarrely tries to handwave the fiancé thing away, then five minutes later insults Tasha, telling her she’s not worthy of a prince. Alexander won’t hear of this, and Tasha even manages to win over his father, so good for her, and they can go ahead and live happily ever after.

If you can believe it, these movies keep getting worse. On top of the usual suspects (predictable plot, corny dialog, subpar acting), I have so many questions about Tasha’s hospital. The children are sick enough to spend days and weeks inpatient, but have no medical equipment in their rooms. The entire pediatric cancer ward appears to have about two nurses and one doctor. Tasha is a pediatrician; shouldn’t there at the very least be an oncologist somewhere around? Why does the prince need to stay at the hospital for a broken leg? And where on earth are all the children’s parents? Why are these supposedly extremely sick children running around unsupervised? So many questions, and no answers.