Just one more thing - a surprise at the end, might have made this movie a cult classic in time. And that is if Ashley had actually turned out to be smuggling or transporting a bomb in her red box. But as it is, "Debbie Macomber's Dashing Through the Snow" is about as far-fetched, far-out, as one can get for a film with this plot and these characters, let alone at Christmas. Of course, the holidays provide the setting for the plot.
If this film at all closely follows Macomber's book that it's based on, it must be quite a read. It's hard to imagine how this plot was laid down in print. But the producers did a terrible job with the screenplay. Even granting the weird plot, and the bit of humor that actually can conjure up a smile or laugh, the technical production is terrible. The biggest problem is it's terrible scenes and overviews of tracking Ashley and Dash as they drive from the San Francisco airport to Seattle.
All of the filming was done in British Columbia, and it's too bad they couldn't spend just a little money to send an extra film crew for one day of helicopter filming along Interstate 5. They do a neat job of plotting the progress of the trip on a map that shows them going by Sacramento and Redding, California, and then Mistletoe, Medford, Salem and Wilsonville, in Oregon. But every scene cut to Dash and Ashley driving shows them on a forested two-lane highway with nary any traffic. From the late 1980s to mid-2000s, I drove large portions of that route many times, including several trips the full length. And anyone who has driven the I-5 Corridor would notice the fake traveling route and scenes. That is a very busy divided four-lane corridor. While it passes through scenic areas, and forest lands, the corridor is wide and open with distant views from San Francisco to Redding, and then in other stretches in Oregon including the last 120 miles in the Willamette Valley leading to Portland.
Many holiday movies are being made in British Columbia, and locales there can resemble places in the States, especially coastal areas. But when most of a plot takes place in an area, in which many scenes are filmed, and characters' movements are being followed in the story, more care should have been taken to at least get some film footage of the area - in this case, the I-5 highway corridor in California and Oregon.
Besides the location scene problems, this film suffers n other ways. Meghan Ory is way over the top antsy, fast talkative, and overacting in the first half of the film. Andrew Walker is good as Dash Sutherland, but most of the FBI cast either overact or seem too goofy rather than funny. If this movie had been made as a satire, the characters such as Blade, played by Aleks Paunovic, would have been much funnier.
Another subplot, with two guys from a bakery changing car license plates because one of their had expired, helped break up the monotony of the long drive that Ashley and Dash had. On the other hand, it was goofy and a distraction from the main characters. It becomes obvious how that will play into the story of the FBI trailing the couple (and Dash actually being an FBI agent). In a satire that could have been played for much more humor. But it's rather flat here.
With a better screenplay and a calmer Ashley, a deep romance in two days would be a little more believable. Then, shoot some scenes of I-5 and slip them in when going to scenes of Ashley and Dash on the road, and this could be a very good holiday season movie, with good humor.
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