This is a difficult film to review...I can't fault the cast, I think they did an excellent job acting and I think they deserved better material. For example a character has a big epiphany and does a job pitch for the financial director position involving travel vacations or cards for a limited market???? Very confusing. And that is not the only confusing piece in this film, they visit a "rewilding" retreat to a soundtrack of Christian music but are tapping in to ethnic roots on an island that are African or Native American? I was never really sure and this mixed soundtrack contributed to that confusion.
My favorite role was played by the tough retreat leader, Ariella Benjamin, played by Samantha Beaulieu. She was great! It was also really nice seeing Tamera Mowry-Housley playing an adult role after watching her as a child actress. She is beautiful, both inside and out.
The story is roughly about three friends who intend to celebrate one of their birthdays by going on a girls gone wild like retreat, but due to a booking mistake by a careless assistant end up on a as one of the three put it more "woo-woo" retreat where they connect spiritually on an island. Once the mistake is understood, they discover that they are stuck on the island until the ferry boat comes back on Friday. The three friends are a hardworking former professional now stay at home mom with lots of kids (although we never find out the actual number) who secretly wants to go back to work, a small business owner who owns a salon that was funded by the stay at home mom and who secretly wants to become a mom herself even though she is not in a relationship and finally the birthday girl who is a professional working in the financial department of a company (?) who got her bachelor's in art and secretly wants to go back to being an artist even though she feels obligated to take care of her widowed mother who is loosing her memory (Alzheimer's?). The three of them struggle, fight and eventually make up...all while figuring out what they want to do with the rest of their lives.
There were quite a few holes in the storyline. The location was beautiful, the acting was good, there was not as much focus on the romantic storyline (although there is a romantic storyline) and like others whose reviews I have read I also thought due to the hype and advertising that I saw on the Hallmark channels that this was going to be a series. It may have benefited from more character development and more work on the storylines that a series could have given it.
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