Happy Howlidays

Guy meets girl. Girl hates guy. But girl must spend time with guy so she can write a blog about their dogs falling in love.

Welcome to Hallmark movie land, where blandly attractive people with no chemistry stand next to each other in furnished model homes. It’s a winning formula.

In Happy Howlidays, Mia Park writes a blog for the Seattle Tourism Board. She sleeps in a bed full of potato chips. Her parents want her to move back to Miami, but she pretends to be too busy with work to even talk to them. She also doesn’t like Christmas for some reason.

On her way home from work, she rescues a dog stuck in a fence, then is bewildered when the pup follows her home. She feeds him some noodles, heads upstairs to bed, then wakes up to find him tearing apart her pillows. She charges downstairs and lands in a puddle of urine.

“There’s only room for one hot mess around here!” she says, still standing in the pee.

She tries to dump the dog at Puptown, an animal shelter run by Max Covington — a name that has never existed outside a Danielle Steel novel. Max won’t allow it, but his own mopey mutt takes a shine to Mia’s troublemaker.

Mia ends up posting a video of the two dogs on the Tourist Board website. Her boss demands more of this scintillating content. “Our site traffic is up 25 percent!” Mia has no choice but to spend more time with Max. Will love blossom? Will Mia find common ground with her parents? Will the shelter find funding to stay open another year? Will someone vacuum Mia’s bed?

Full disclosure: I don’t really “get” Hallmark movies. My brother Daniel loves them, especially around the holidays. He was the one who insisted we watch this.

To my untrained eye, the thing that makes a Hallmark movie work is the right amount of sweetness and camp. If you get the balance right, you can overlook the wooden acting, the bland sets, and the lapses in internal logic. “It’s just a Hallmark movie,” people shrug.

Happy Howlidays is a Hallmark movie. It’s also terrible. There’s no craft or artistry to it. It’s a dumb meet-cute between two unlikable characters that drags on for an hour and a half. The plot is predictable and full of dumb cliches. Even the dogs are an afterthought that exist to bring the characters together and nothing more.

They do repeat the dog pee gag a few times, though. So if that’s your idea of comedy, then buckle up.