A medieval English knight is magically transported to the present day where he falls for a high school science teacher who is disillusioned by love.
Hmm. Well, this certainly...exists. We've had Anna Kendricks in Noelle, Isabella Moner is Let It Snow, now Vanessa Hudgens is in The Knight Before Christmas. Another comedy, rom-com Christmas movie that skirts by on a weak plot, thanks to an attractive and charismatic lead actress.
That's really all there is to say about this one. It has all of the tropes and clichés of a generic Hallmark movie. Predictable from the very start, and with so little going on in the story outside of the romantic development arc thinly veiled as a science fiction/fantasy honour quest.
To it credit, it does a reasonable job with the fish-out-of-water aspect of a medieval knight being teleported into modern-day times, but even then, many of the directions that they took the comedy felt unoriginal. Most of the enjoyment in the humour came from recognising similarities between this film and Marvel's Thor. That whole aspect was used for cheap laughs, grabbing all of the low-hanging fruit, and then discarding it.
Perhaps it is because I am male, but I need more than a love interest plot. I need something else to bring in variety and develop the characters in any way other than "these two people are attractive and will, therefore, fall in love". The time travel element had a lot of potential with our male lead having some fun interactions with modern technology. However, he overcame the 700 years of technological evolution very quickly, removing the only distraction from the romance arc.
The script is so sloppily thrown together that conflicts are added in for a scene or two before being disregarded. The ex-boyfriend plot arc simply disappears and is never mentioned again. The conniving and meddling friend arc is resolved with a simple glance. Time is spent coming up with these side stories, but nothing comes from them.
The cinematography is actually well-executed. Unfortunately for the female characters, the make-up artist was not so apt with her execution, applying the make-up so thick that the caking was very much visible and at the forefront with the great high definition camera and its utilisation of close-up shots.
There's nothing else to really say. The destination was obvious from the opening scenes, and the journey to get there felt forced and inauthentic. There was a lack of chemistry between the stars, but Hudgens still manages to keep some minimal level of interest with her charms. Definitely not a Christmas classic. All going well I'll never need to see it again.