Let It Snow is a Netflix adaptation of a book from 2008, Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances. I had read this book back in 2012, as it was co-written by one of my favorite authors, John Green. While not my favorite book, I at least thought it was a pretty good Christmas book. I wasn’t really itching for and adaption of the book, but I was also happy to see that a movie of the book got made. This adaptation is a bit of a mixed bag and ends up feeling much more like a cliche holiday movie than its book did, but the end result is still not too bad.

One thing I will say for anyone out there that has also read the book is that you’re going to have to just dismiss what you already know about the book. While Let It Snow features most of the same characters as the book, their storylines are pretty drastically different. It’s the same kind of format where we’re following storylines for multiple “couples,” but what’s happening to them is much different. There are four pairings that we follow throughout the movie. There’s Julie and Stewart, who meet on a train and spend some time together. Julie is faced with a tough decision about whether to go to college or stay home to take care of her sick mother, while Stewart is a famous pop star that’s just trying to get out of the spotlight for a bit while passing through town. The second pairing is Tobin and Angie, who have been best friends since they were young. Tobin is starting to develop feelings for Angie, though, and he wants to try and tell her, but a college friend of Angie’s named JP visits town, and Tobin thinks that they like each other. There’s Addie and Jeb, who are kind of on the rocks a bit. Jeb wants some personal space to hang out with friends, but Addie is so paranoid that she constantly thinks that Jeb is cheating on her. Finally, there is Dorrie and Kerry, a pairing that wasn’t seen in the book and has been added for the movie. Basically, these two girls shared a huge connection recently, but now Dorrie encounters Kerry in public and is given the cold shoulder because Kerry is not openly out about being a lesbian.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll know how different all of this sounds. With that, though, I’m going to try to stop with any book comparisons because of how different it is, and instead try to just judge it for what it is. I think the best way to review a movie like this that’s following multiple storylines is to judge it on its individual stories, so I’ll give my feelings on each of them.

The Julie/Stewart story has a weird trade-off. It’s perhaps the easiest story in the movie to get attached to, and there is some great chemistry between the actors playing them. Julie actually feels like a very fleshed out character here too with an added backstory. While the pop star angle for Stewart make things a bit more fun and whimsical, it also makes things much more commonplace and cliche for their story. This is the kind of storyline that you’d see play out in a Hallmark movie, but there is at least a bit more polish here. Tobin/Angie was my personal favorite one, but mainly because I love the storyline of two friends that secretly like each other but are too afraid to tell the other. I wasn’t a huge fan of Tobin’s actor, but I did ultimately like this one a lot. The Addie/Jeb one is definitely the worst one of the movie. It’s certainly the least developed, but it’s also one where I didn’t really like either character, because they’re both kind of awful. I find this one to be the biggest shame, because while this was also my least favorite story in the book, they had such a better and more developed storyline for them in the book. This was the one where the changes baffled me the most, because it actually had a pretty unique story, and has now been turned into something pretty unlikeable. Finally, there’s the added Dorrie/Kerry story. It’s easy to see that this storyline was forced in to appeal to the LGBTQ+ market in the name of being “more inclusive,” and so it does ultimately feel like a pretty unnecessary story, but it’s still not too bad. The characters have interesting enough personalities (particularly Dorrie), it’s just their arc that’s generic and done-to-death. If you’ve seen one “coming out of the closet” storyline, then this will be super familiar to you.

That about sums up my thoughts on the movie as a whole too. This is a movie that’s going to feel very familiar to you if you’ve seen any holiday romance movies, and so it doesn’t exactly break new ground in that department. It may be generic and cliche at times, but it’s also an inoffensive feel-good movie that’s easy to watch. In a lot of my reviews for movies like this, I like to say how sometimes I just need a mindless movie to turn my brain off during, and Let It Snow falls into that camp for me. It did nothing for me in terms of making me think or appreciate the art form or anything like that, but it was a nice distraction for 90 minutes that gave me some holiday cheer during the Christmas season. Watch it if you are looking for this kind of movie, but otherwise it’s not a must-see by any means.

3/5