I’M EXCITED FOR Christmas. I think enough time has passed between Halloween and now that enables us to start celebrating the inevitable arrival of Santa. Hey, there are people on my bus route who have their trees up already. 

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So, I declare it time to use the dark evenings to cuddle up with a hot chocolate (spiked with Baileys), Penneys fluffy socks, and a festive Netflix movie.

Last year, the world went crazy over the bad but brilliant A Christmas Prince. The sequel will be released on November 30, but we need something to tide us over until then.

Thanks to Netflix, there’s a new terrible fave in town. It’s The Princess Switch, and it’s streaming right now, a good month before Christmas. 

Vanessa Hudgens, remember her? From High School Musical? 

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She stars as the two main characters, a la Lindsay Lohan in the Parent Trap. If there’s one thing I love, it’s Hollywood producers getting bang for their buck when it comes to an actor. See Armie Hammer in the Social Network.

I’ll be real with you.

From the get go, this movie is horrible. 

Hudgens tries her best, but the script is just cringe after cringe. At some point though, you end up falling for it completely, seemingly in on the joke with the filmmakers. 

Basically, Hudgens plays both a baker and a princess. We meet the baker Stacy first, where we see she’s living a mildly pathetic existence, still sore about her ex boyfriend breaking up with her.

When her precocious Goddaughter and friend Kevin tell her they entered her in a baking competition in the Kingdom of Belgravia, she laments how she could never do something so adventurous.

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There we have it, strike one. This woman is boring for the sake of being boring, it’s a character trait. 

Strike two, comes when Stacy bumps into her ex and his new girlfriend, which spurs her on to go for the contest. Ah, of course. Better yourself for revenge. 

Along the way, there’s a mysterious old man, and a mean competitor, all that seem to have a place in the plot that was written out at the last minute. At this point I’ve already lost count of the strikes. 

Stacy soon meets Lady Margaret Delacourt who is engaged to be married to Edward, the kingdom’s Crown Prince. The only thing is, Margaret seemingly hates Eddie here and wants to switch places with Stacy for a few days of freedom, because they look EXACTLY ALIKE.

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Not one of them is nearly freaked out enough about this to satisfy any sense of anger I had over the whole thing. If I met a woman who was literally a carbon copy of me, so much so that she could fool my future husband into thinking she WAS me, I’d want to know exactly how this came to be. 

Marg’s first impulse is to get this strange woman to pretend to be her so she can escape her life for a few days. Seems like something she needs to deal with internally. 

This aside, the two clones agree to switch places for a while on the condition that Margaret lets Kevin’s daughter into some ballet. Whatever. Cheap plot details aside, giving up your freedom to grant your annoying little Goddaughter’s wishes isn’t something you’d do, especially after learning your clone is royalty. 

With respect to Vanessa, she can pull of an English accent quite well. It’s the only way we can literally tell these two people apart, considering they’re both the same person. 

Stacy with the Prince

Any one of us can see what happens next. Stacy falls in love with annoying Ed, while Margaret falls in love with Kevin. She loves living a normal life, which isn’t too much of a shock considering she fucking hated being royalty so much that she asked a stranger to live in her castle and pretend to be her for a few days just to escape it. 

Annoying child finds out about the switch, but doesn’t tell anymore, mainly because she probably knows she’s gaining something from it. Again, she’s not nearly freaked out enough to discover she has been left alone with this strange woman, identical to her godmother, for hours and hours. 

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The Queen Caroline finds out about the switch from the butler, but of course. King George had spotted that something was up and asked him to spy on Margaret.

Can we get a round of applause for George, the only moron who had a slight inkling that this complete randomer wasn’t his daughter in law? 

I’m not really sure what happens then. 

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The jealous competitor from earlier messes with Stacy’s baking entry, but she still ends up winning. This was basically to cause drama, without dwelling too much on an actual plot, I guess.

Margaret and Stacy admit everything, and the former renounces the crown so she can be with Kevin. Of course, Stacy marries the Prince and everyone lives happily ever after.

Why isn’t the Prince angrier? Imagine. You’re going along happily with the love of your life and next of all you find out they’re someone completely different. Your fiancee literally switched lives with someone to avoid you for a couple of days?  

It was TERRIBLE from start to finish. So, I’d recommend opening a bottle of red and getting stuck into it tonight. Don’t forget the premature selection box. 

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