Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story
Writer: Julie Sherman Wolfe
Director: John Putch
Cast: Hunter King, Tyler Hynes, Ed Begley Jr., Megyn Price, Diedrich Bader, Christine Ebersole, Richard Riehle
Hunter King (The Santa Summit) plays Alana, a third-generation Kansas City Chiefs superfan who has the perfect gift idea for her incredibly close family: the chance to win the Chiefs' Fan of the Year contest! They have a real shot at it, too, because this family's fandom goes deeper than autographed jerseys and bobbleheads. Alana's parents (Megyn Price, Diedrich Bader) met at a Kansas City Chiefs game, because their parents (Ed Begley Jr., whose character is a widower, and Christine Ebersole and Richard Riehle) had tickets next to each other. It's more than a fandom—it's their lives!
Enter Tyler Hynes (Never Been Chris'd) as Derrick, a rep from the Chiefs fan engagement department — except Alana and her family don't know that's who he is when arrives in town. They get off on the wrong foot when Derrick acts skeptical about the family's ... magic toboggan, which they believe grants the Chiefs some game-winning luck if worn — yes, worn — on Christmas day. ("Toboggan" as in hat. Beanie. Stocking cap. I'm from Tennessee and I refuse to call it a tuque.)
Will Alana's family win the Fan of the Year contest? Will her family warm up to Derrick after his antimagic faux pas? And most importantly: Will the Chiefs win the Super Bowl? Are they in the Super Bowl? Didn't they just win? What year is this? Obviously I'm a Hallmark gay and not a football guy.
Home For the Holidays: Of course Holiday Touchdown takes place in Kansas City — but, also of course, it can't take place in a city. That's why Alana's family actually live two-and-a-half hours south of Kansas City, in Independence, a town with a population of 8,500. Every single one of them is needed for the annual Light the Block event, which decorates all the shops on Main Street.
'Twas the Night Before This Movie: "Derrick, you know you've been doing an amazing job the past few months, right?" That one sentence tells us Derrick's name, his work ethic, and the fact that he's new-ish to Kansas City. That's some exposition, right there!
They Brought Presence: Listen: you put a legend like Abraham Benrubi (ER, Roy's gay son on Wings, Olaf the troll on Buffy) in a Hallmark movie as a bell-ringing Santa Claus, one who very likely is the real Santa Claus? That's a great Christmas present!
Ho Ho Ho: It probably wasn't meant to be a joke, but I cracked up at "I'm sorry for being a little bit salty in the fan cave."
As Advertised: If you're going to capitalize on the Chiefs-mania kicked up by Travis Kelce's relationship with Taylor Swift and the team's [Brett Googles football] Super Bowl win this year, you really can't beat a title like Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story.
If it's not evidenced by me needing to Google this year's Super Bowl results, I'm not coming to this movie with a ton of — okay, any — enthusiasm for sports that do not involve women clapping chalk all over their hands or men in speedos wrestling over a ball above underwater cameras. (The Summer Olympics are a very good time for me.) So, while Holiday Touchdown goes to great pains to tell me that there are cameos from KC celebs happening, I will not be able to tell you any specifics. Go elsewhere for that. Sorry!
What I can tell you is that I do feel a resonance with Alana and her family's passion for Kansas City football. Surprisingly, I also feel a deep connection with what this movie has to say about the role of sports in the familial structure and how the shared ritual of rooting for a team ultimately has little to do with wins and losses and everything to do with the in-it-togetherness that sports builds between generations. Yeah, this is what I'm coming away from Holiday Touchdown ruminating on. I'm ruminating. After Hallmark's on-the-nose and of-the-moment football cash-in football movie, the one with a cameo from Taylor Swift's future mother-in-law. (I guess? I don't know.)
This shocks me because, at first glance, Holiday Touchdown is barely a passable Hallmark holiday movie. It starts out pretty aggressively average. Perfectly fine. A fine way to spend the afternoon while at home with your folks over the holidays. The cast is unimpeachable; Tyler Hynes and Hunter King are two of the most reliable stars in the Hallmark stable. And the supporting cast? Begley, Price, Bader, Ebersole, and Riehle are all incredibly impressive names. But for the first quarter of the movie, the tone felt a little over the top — a little like this A+ cast of heavy-hitters were acting like they thought actors should act in a Hallmark movie.
And then, once the exposition and initial misunderstanding is out of the way and we get into the rhythm of Alana and Derrick's relationship ... a kind of magic happens. It starts when Derrick does a small (to him) act of kindness to strangers, a father and daughter, that completely changes their holiday. I cried.
I did not expect to cry during Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story. Yet there I was, seeing a father and his young daughter being absolutely stoked about the Chiefs. And then later, seeing how Alana bonded with her grandfather over that same team. Tears. I would say I don't know why this kept happening, over and over again, but I know why: because the way Alana and her family feel about the Chiefs is the way my family feels about the University of Tennessee's Volunteers — all of them except me. Of course I knew what the Vols meant to my family, but this movie made me understand a little bit of what I missed out on by being an indoors kid with too many allergies who just wanted to read comics and watch cable TV 24/7. It got me. It got me good.
And because of that, I really can't claim that Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story didn't spike the ball in the [Googles] end zone. It did exactly what it intended to do and then some. Seriously, the shots in the Chiefs stadium are quite possibly the most epic shots in any Hallmark movie ever. It absolutely delivered on the feels. It made me believe in the power of a magic toboggan and Abraham Benrubi-Claus
