The Knight Before Christmas is a 2019 Holiday film about a medieval English knight who is magically transported to the present day where he falls for a high school science teacher.
It’s 1334 and Sir Cole (Josh Whitehouse) is on a Christmas quest, venturing through the snowy forests until he meets a mysterious old woman lurking in the trees. He offers her great kindness and for reward she promises him his destiny shall be fulfilled, using magic to whisk him into the present day. There, he ends up in rural Ohio during the holidays and meets Brooke (Vanessa Hudgens), a sweet science teacher and doting aunt to her sister’s (Emmanuelle Chriqui) daughter. Brooke has lost her hope for love, coping with a broken relationship and a family tragedy. Now on a quest of her own to help Cole return to his own century, they grow closer and he begins to wonder if maybe he’s happier in this time than his back in the castle.
So you’re probably not far off in thinking director Monika Mitchell‘s lightweight romcom The Knight Before Christmas isn’t all that deep, the very name of our hero knight the first hint that things aren’t going to be too challenging (Say it fast. Or not. It’s Circle). Now to be fair, hardly a single romcom Christmas movie has ever tread too far into the heavy snows, the agenda at hand simple and breezy, putting two attractive people together and getting them to fall in love.
Still, it’s pretty silly just how breezy this one is, the film hopelessly cheeky, clinging wholesale to its coloring book fairy tale mentality, with Cole transported to our times and barely missing a beat, not distressed at all with the shocking differences, immediately pointing out the metal flying dragons (airplanes) and steel steeds (cars). The hardships of adjusting to a time completely out of sync with his own is not really the point; in fact this is a movie that doesn’t even need Cole to be where he’s from, using him only as a way for Brooke to lament the loss of her last boyfriend and compare old times with new ones.
It doesn’t make a lick of sense and is so light it feels like it might flitter away on a wisp, but that’s the thing with Holiday movies like this, it has nothing to do with reality or conflict or just about anything authentic, simply trying to get laughs out of a guy who doesn’t fit in. That’s nothing new of course and the jokes here are about as inventive as you’d expect, with Cole trying to make an Amazon Alexa work and calling a TV a magic box just to name a few.
That all said, at least it embraces its saccharin sweetness and lets a couple of charming leads do what they do best, with Hudgens effortlessly warm and inviting while Whitehouse does what he can with a role that doesn’t really give him much to do but speak like he’s is a high school adaptation of a Dickens play. And with that comparison, the whole thing makes an easy target for a Christmas Scrooge to lower the boom, but instead, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and let it be what it intends, a modest distraction to turn off your brain and let it do its thing.