Reel Snippet – The Princess Switch
Summary: Stacy DeNovo (Vanessa Hudgens) is a baker is Chicago who lives her life on a tight schedule. Her coworker and best friend Kevin (Nick Sager) and his daughter Olivia (Alexa Adeosun) convince her to attend a prestigious baking competition in the foreign Kingdom of Belgravia, which leads to a shock when she comes face to face with national prince’s fiance, the Duchess Margaret Delacourt (Vanessa Hudgens). Margaret has a brilliant plan: the two of them switch places for a few days until the wedding so that Margaret can experience what it’s like to be an ordinary person for once in her life. After the switch, Margaret takes to civilian life and bonds with Kevin and Olivia quite closely while Stacy discovers that she has a lot of chemistry with Prince Edward (Sam Palladio). It seems that walking in each other’s shoes is a fleeting fairy tale that won’t last, but as they say, Christmas miracles can happen.
Review: The Princess Switch, on paper, sounds like a really stupid Disney Channel version of The Prince and the Pauper, but it is surprisingly very charming. It’s hard to pin down what makes the movie work exactly, but it may be part that the characters are very likeable and despite the average acting, there seems to be chemistry among everyone. None of the guys feel like they’re owed anything and even admit to fault while the gals refrain from acting waspish and needy (save for one bit character in the baking contest, but that’s not important). Add to that a few decent laughs and you’ll find a nice breath of fresh air when compared to movies like The Holiday Calendar.
The movie does have some severe cheese, like how everything gets resolved very neatly toward the end, there’s a guy who keeps popping up in the movie who could be Santa Claus, God, or Clarence on another trip to Earth, and it was a bit cheeky of Netflix to use this to promote one of its other Christmas movies. Also, it’s kind of odd that we have yet another story about a monarchy from a fictional European country (I’m going to assume that Belgravia shares borders with Latveria, Markovia, and Genovia). But all of the cheese winds up adding flavor to it and it makes this a nice movie awash with holiday spirit and scenery. It beats the bar of the average, mediocre Hallmark movie, so if this sounds up your alley, give it a watch. It’s likely to give you a smile.
Fun Tidbit: Sam Palladio, the actor who plays Prince Edward, sings the opening song.
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