The Knight Before Christmas

Directed by Monika Mitchell, The Knight Before Christmas follows medieval knight Sir Cole (Josh Whitehouse) as he’s transported to the present day by an Old Crone (Ella Kenion) and eventually finds himself falling for an unlucky in love high-school teacher (Vanessa Hudgens’ Brooke Winters). It’s a seemingly foolproof premise that is, for the most part, employed to hopelessly underwhelming and aggressively bland effect by Mitchell, as the filmmaker, working from Cara J. Russell’s screenplay, delivers a perpetually uninvolving romcom that contains few, if any, attributes designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest – with the movie’s most egregious failing its refusal (or inability) to wholeheartedly exploit its various fish-out-of-water elements. (Sir Cole’s initial arrival in the present day contains a few such moments, including his referral to an airplane as a “steel dragon,” but otherwise the character adjusts to his new surroundings far too quickly.) The arms-length atmosphere is compounded by Greg Gardiner’s often astonishingly styleless visuals and an overall emphasis on frustratingly generic subplots and periphery characters, which, when coupled with a terminal absence of chemistry between Whitehouse and Hudgens’ one-note protagonists, paves the way for an often endless second half that’s hardly as romantic or engaging as Mitchell has intended – with the end result a fairly worthless piece of work that rarely lives up to the promise of its irresistible setup.

*1/2 out of ****