As the Christmas train keeps chugging along towards December 25, we’re also chugging along with our 12 days of Christmas movies, and we’re nearly to the halfway point already. Can you believe it? Today, we’re talking about a little Netflix Christmas movie called Operation Christmas Drop, starring Kat Graham and Alexander Ludwig, directed by Martin Wood.

This 2020 movie is based on the real-life U.S. Air Force humanitarian mission (which is also called Operation Christmas Drop). I know you might be thinking, wow, that sounds like a dumb idea for a movie.

And you would be right.

So remember in my review of Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares when I said most Christmas movies are about a woman who’s too career-driven who then gets softened by a good man with a lot of heart? Yeah, that’s basically the plot of this movie. I barely need to tell you anything else. Erica (played by Kat Graham) is a congressional assistant in Washington, DC. She never has time to go home for Christmas because fuck family, am I right? If women choose to care about their career, they obviously don’t also have time to hang out with their mom and dad.

Anyway, Erica can’t go home this particular Christmas because her grinchy boss has asked her to visit a US Air Force base in Guam and basically find a reason to shut the whole thing down.

Andrew (our good man with a lot of heart) is an Air Force captain at the Guam base who is tasked with showing Erica around and basically convincing her that the work they do there is worthwhile and they should stay open.

Clearly they fall in love and her icy cold heart is melted.

Oh, I’m sorry. Did I spoil this pointless movie?

Let’s just get to the Christmas rankings.

Romance: 7/10. I guess there is a legit romance here. It’s pretty canned, and I don’t find this dude hot at all because I’m not into the whole boring-ass white military dude type of thing. But I’m sure he’s cute to some people. And Kat Graham is pretty. We know this. I guess it’s not fair to base a romance on how hot you think the leads are, but maybe I wouldn’t be considering their level of hotness if they had any amount of chemistry with one another. With a romantic movie, when the chemistry is right, everyone seems hot because the connection is fire. The hottest thing here was the locale. But, I don’t know, I guess it makes sense that these two people ended up together? So we’ll go with 7/10.

Morality: 7/10. This movie has your very typical Christmas moral: the holiday season is all about giving, and if you don’t love giving to other people, then you’re a big Grinch. And you’d better start learning how to be more giving by the end of the movie or Santa won’t bring you any presents or something. I don’t know.

I think my main issue with that moral in this particular story is that we’re supposed to see the US military as the good guys. As I mentioned at the beginning of this 2020 series, I’m pretty disillusioned this year. I mean more than I normally am. Part of that (a BIG part of that) is being disillusioned with our country. So what is the US military really doing in Guam? Cause we know it’s not just about giving out presents and supplies on Christmas.

I’m still giving this movie 7 for morality because it does have a pretty standard and obvious moral. But. Yawn.

Music: 9/10. I have said time and time again that if real people are singing actual Christmas songs as part of the movie, then we have to bump up this score by quite a lot. There’s a lot of Christmas song singing in this movie. Bonus points because it’s Christmas music accompanied by a ukulele.

Christmas Spirit: 5/10. There’s no snow anywhere because it’s hot as hell, so I’m already mad about that just going in to this rating. Yes, there are a lot of Christmas decorations just hanging around everywhere, but it all seems so lackluster. And I don’t know where to take off points for this, so I’m just going to do it here. This movie features an extremely horribly rendered CGI gecko that I just cannot get behind at all.

So is this movie technically Christmassy? Sure. But in the most phoning-it-in way possible. Which brings us to our final category…

Warmth: 0/10. If someone wanted to just throw together a paint-by-numbers Christmas movie, it would be this one. There were no surprises. Nothing to distinguish these characters from the Christmas characters you see in any basic Hallmark Christmas movie. They tried to throw in some children to give this movie a little more warmth, but it didn’t work. The children also just ended up being a cog in the machine that was this horribly formulaic Christmas movie disaster.

Like for real, if you want to feel anything this holiday season, skip this movie. It might leave you feeling numb for days after you watch it. It’s that boring.

Where does that leave us?

28/50 = 56%/F. And this was a very generous rating, folks. The more I think about this movie, the more I’m mad it exists.

Cancel Netflix and get as far away from this movie as possible.

See you in a few days for day 6 of this 2020 Christmas journey!