'The 12 Dates of Christmas' Review
Release Date: 11/06/26 [Hulu on Disney+]
Genre: Romance.
MPAA: Not Rated.
Distributor: Hulu.
The Verdict: A Mistake
Hallmark churns out trashy but lovable Christmas movies year after year. Their popularity has skyrocketed in recent years, spurring a plethora of merchandise and even a cruise experience where seafaring folks can rub elbows with the top Hallmark Christmas movie stars. Now other platforms and studios are desperately trying to capture their own version of the cheesy Christmas movie magic that Hallmark has so effortlessly perfected. The 12 Dates of Christmas falls into this knockoff category.
The movie’s premise lines up beautifully with the Hallmark formula. Christina Walker (Lucy Hale) lives in a tiny town, owns her own shop where she restores furniture, and is perpetually single. Her family is disappointed each year when she arrives at her parents' home without a man by her side. Her mother (Penelope Ann Miller) subtly places an empty place setting and chair next to Christina for their Christmas dinner, just in case. After another year of being single, Christina promises her mother that next Christmas she will have a boyfriend.
With the help of her perky friend Molly (Kahyun Kim), Christina vows to go on 12 dates in the 12 weeks leading up to Christmas. The dates all go awry in some form. An influencer live-streams the date, one guy brings his mother, and another brings his ventriloquist dummy. Each dating encounter is more ridiculous and unbelievable than the last. All the while, Christina’s old high school classmate Peter (Ian Harding) lurks in the background, commissioning her to restore an old loveseat and hanging around her shop. And well, you can pretty much guess what happens in the end.
Hale tries her best to infuse the overbearing, kooky script with some believability. She and Harding reconnect almost a decade after their career-defining roles in the hit television series Pretty Little Liars and pick up where their easy chemistry left off. One of the movie's biggest flaws is that the duo doesn’t share more screen time—the few scenes they do have together feel contrived and too short to really see any sparks fly.
The movie had tremendous potential, but the good chemistry of Harding and Hale goes to waste, Paul Ben-Victor’s talents aren’t utilized, and the outlandish dating bits grow tiresome, particularly because it’s unclear whether Christina is actually interested in finding a man or if she’s only doing it to appease her mother. Plus, there’s the glaring missed opportunity to actually say something meaningful about the unfair and unwanted societal pressures and judgments placed on women in their 30s who happen to be or choose to be single. Unfortunately, The 12 Dates of Christmas is too ridiculous to take seriously and not funny enough to be a fun popcorn movie.
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