It’s Hallmark season, baby, and it’s also the second Christmas we all get to spend with the Swift-Kelce household. Yay! Taylor and Travis are going as strong as ever, and that means the feel-good movie manufacturers of the world have had a full 12 months to write and film their Tayvis holiday rom-coms.
The first one of the season was last week’s Christmas in the Spotlight, Lifetime’s move to plant a flag in the genre. Now it’s Hallmark’s turn with the romantic Christmas juggernaut Holiday Touchdown, premiering Nov. 30. While it is probably the loosest Swelce adaptation we’re likely to get this side of Kansas City, it is certainly a walking, talking über-advertisement for everyone’s new favorite football team. Anyone for some Chiefs merch?? You can practically reach through your TV screen and grab it.
Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story (everything you need to know, right in the title) opens with a touching family history of two households united by their affection for a certain football team. They sit in the same seats, their children grow up together and eventually marry, and, by and by. main character Alana Higman is born: “If there was ever a child born to be the Chiefs’ number one fan, it’s me.”
In the present day, a now adult Alana (Hunter King), in her Chiefs fanaticism, has turned a small town’s main street into a Kansas City Chiefs hot spot while running her family’s merchandise store, in much the same way Willy Wonka turned his humble chocolate factory into an elaborate fantasyland for an army of Oompa Loompas.
Alana and her family are in the running to win the Chiefs’ Fan of the Year contest (against, among others, a miserable-looking cat in a Patrick Mahomes outfit), but they’ll have to get past director of fan engagement and wool-peacoat enthusiast Derrick Taylor (Tyler Hynes) first. Derrick and Alana hit it off during the evaluation, despite Alana knowing more Chiefs factoids than him, but there’s only one problem: He doesn’t believe in their game-day superstition—the family’s magical Chiefs Christmas hat, which has the power to grant the team a victory if worn on Christmas Day.
As I said, it’s a loose adaptation of TayTrav. The characters’ hair color (Alana, blonde; Derrick, brown and beardy) and the sports team that connects them are really the only things that have anything to do with entertainment’s royal couple, though the movie is populated with a number of slightly uncomfortable-looking large men who I can only assume are Chiefs players. Travis Kelce’s mom Donna Kelce is also in the movie and has multiple lines—even after all that smack she talked about her son’s showbiz aspirations!
The whole thing has that anonymous rom-com sheen and enough remove from its source material while being winky-winky about it to put one in the mindset of all of those romance novels with the cartoony covers that definitely aren’t drawings of Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley and definitely aren’t based on hastily edited heavily sexual Star Wars fan fiction. What do you mean, Holiday Touchdown is “secretly” about one of the most famous celebrity couples right now? It’s about Alana and Derrick. Pay attention.
That said, it actually was not difficult for me to pay attention to this movie, even given that Swift and Kelce and football and holiday-themed rom-coms aren’t really my bag. I am not the target audience for Holiday Touchdown, and yet, here I am, invested.
I would dare to say that the plot was not necessarily riveting, aside from one tense moment near the end, but that’s not what these movies are meant for. The novelty of the experience—watching a movie inspired by two real people but ultimately having next to nothing to do with those real people and yet starring multiple real people who have probably hung out with its subjects many times—is what was fun. I actually surprised myself by tearing up near the end at a reaction given by Ed Begley, Jr. (yes, he’s in this, too!) to something I cannot spoil. Never in my, ahem, wildest dreams, did I expect that. Maybe it was the general sincerity of the rest of the movie that primed me for such a display of emotion.
Am I a Hallmark Christmas rom-com girlie now? Have Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce healed me? Should I start some Yuletide football superstitions of my own? Should we all? I know a small-town general store that sells Chiefs hats, if you’re interested.
