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film review by Richard Roeper on Nov. 5, 2020.
Netflix presents a film directed by Martin Wood and written by Gregg Rossen and Brian Sawyer. This is a film so sweet it might give you a contact sugar rush, but it features two inherently likable, great-looking romantic leads, a fine supporting performance by the always reliable Virginia Madsen, a timeless true-meaning-of-Christmas message, and a genuinely cinematic style, mostly because the movie was actually filmed on Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and the surrounding beaches and jungles and islands. This gives Operation Christmas Drop a feature-film look on a relatively limited budget.
Although the storyline is pure fiction, the film is inspired by the real Operation Christmas Drop, the longest running humanitarian airlift in the world. Every year since 1952, U.S. Air Force personnel at Andersen AFB deliver toys, food, medicine and much-needed supplies to residents of dozens of tiny islands in Micronesia. It’s a wonderful but also essential mission, and it also serves as a training exercise. But in the world of Operation Christmas Drop the movie, the tradition and the base itself might become history, as Virginia Madsen’s hard-ass congresswoman Angie Bradford is under enormous pressure to slash military spending and has Andersen circled on her map. If we’re looking to close down bases, this one’s flashing red and green, says Bradford, who sees the mission as nothing more than using military equipment to drop Christmas presents.
Bradford sends her eager and ambitious aide Erica Miller (Kat Graham) to Guam and tells her to write up a report on all the seemingly frivolous spending on the base. Next thing you know, Erica is on the beach (in business attire and heels, of course) when she meets-cute with one Capt. Andrew Jantz (Alexander Ludwig), the handsome and charming officer who has been assigned to show Erica around and try to dissuade her from writing up a negative report.
The two of them immediately click and become great friends — ah, just kidding, you know what happens. They instantly clash and there’s a lot of bickering and bantering and mild double-crossing in the early going, but there’s a chance, just a Christmas miracle kind of a chance, these two might learn they have more in common than they could possibly have imagined, and how knows, we might even see a magical romance in the making!
Operation Christmas Drop piles on the clichés, from the obligatory FaceTime conversations in which tech-challenged oldsters can’t get the computer thingy to work right, to a romantic interlude of Andrew and Erica snorkeling in crystal blue waters, to Erica having to choose between career and caring, to the advent of a major storm that could sideline the mission before a single plane takes off. The comedy is light and the drama is predictable and the romance is inevitable, but Erica and Andrew deserve their happily ever after, as does the Operation Christmas Drop endeavor. Mission accomplished. [Roeper’s rating: 3 stars out of 4 = 75%]
Blogger's notes: As a former USAF officer (1964-1970) I really enjoyed the military flavor of the film. The drops are conducted by cargo aircraft from the Air Mobility Command. When I was in USAF it was called the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) (1948-66) and then the Military Airlift Command (MAC) (1966-92), before it became the Air Mobility Command. The film was shot on Guam and it was fascinating to see the base and the aircraft.
I should also mention that while the possible closing of Andersen AFB forms the basis of the film's plot, it is hard to imagine a military installation of greater strategic importance. Andersen AFB allows the U.S. to project military power across the Western Pacific as this map shows (Guam is the red dot). It has been called an unsinkable aircraft carrier.
Labels: Christmas, comedy, family, Netflix, romance
IMDb 58/100
MetaScore (critics=47, viewers=40)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=56, viewers=58)
Netflix
Andersen AFB Guam
Wikipedia Operation Christmas Drop (humanitarian operation)
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