Valentine Chabert Watch: An Unexpected Valentine (2025)

I am profoundly upset by how this is not the color, make or model of the car in the movie

Watched:  02/01/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  *unlisted at time of this writing*

Job: Chocolate scientist 

new skill: picking up Lyft drivers
Man: Robert Buckley
Job of Man: Lyft driver/ mediocre artistic photographer
Goes to/ Returns to: just drives in circles, really
Event: product reveal gala?/ gallery show
Food:  baked goods and peanut butter chocolate cookies

This is a movie about a woman who is so lonely on Valentine's Day, she sleeps with her Lyft driver.

I'm sorry, you can dress it up any way you want, but that's what this movie is about, and I'm okay with it.

We watched this movie on a slight delay during its broadcast premier as Hallmark pivots to a two week extravaganza hoping people can believe Valentine's Day, the worst holiday, is as big a deal to people as Christmas, which is a lie, Hallmark.  A terrible lie.

In this movie, which has a script that needed several more passes and major issues with what we like to call "pacing" in the movie-blogging biz, Chabert plays a New York City-based food science person who specializes in chocolate (please remember the chocolate detail).  

I feel like the script was written by AI or a MadLib, because it does follow some oddly specific Hallmark tropes but then refuses to make sense.

Chabert's chocolate scientist starts the movie, as happens A LOT in Hallmark movies, giving a speech to colleagues around a table about their corporation's widget of choice.  In all Hallmark movies, often in Chabert movies, people are so blown over by a lukewarm corporate presentation explaining the hero's job and that she is good at it.  Her audience will lose their minds and offer promises of better jobs.  

In this case, I would believe the script is written by AI as the product Chabert is showing off is: a chocolate purse.  

But, The League, you say...  those two words together make no sense at all.  And, fellow babies, I KNOW.  I watched this 90 minute movie that *showed* chocolate purses, and I never knew what they were supposed to be.  Is it a purse you put your chocolates in?  Is it a purse made of chocolate?  Maybe on the first, yes on the second.  

WHY?  Chabert explains that she's merging fashion and food.  Well, I want to merge submarine battles with Spirograph.  

See.  We can all just say things.  And AI sure will.

(late edit:  holy shit, they exist)

But not only did they get to set with "chocolate purses" in the script, some poor art-director had to figure out what this meant and they had to make chocolate purses.  IT IS INSANE.  Dozens of people were involved here, and still...*

The ticking clock is that Chabert, a scientist, has to give a speech about the purses at a gala event?  At 9:00 PM on Valentine's Day?  Why no one else but the food scientist can do this is a @#$%ing mystery.

Meanwhile, Man is a Lyft driver, who is also a would-be-artist photographer (telling me his pics are not moving).  He ALSO has an event at 9:00, where he's to have a gallery show (which he doesn't want to attend for reasons).  

The basic set-up is that in late afternoon, Lacey Chabert gets into a group-ride Lyft, and along the way, as she's the last passenger, finds someone's engagement ring.  One would think there's a protocol for lost valuables for rideshare, provided the driver doesn't just say "nope, didn't see it" and run off to a pawn shop.  But this movie posits that 

• there is no protocol for when valuables are left behind
• a rideshare service that depends on using mobile phones has 
• no record of who was just in the car
• or their contact information
• that a Lyft driver wouldn't be a little worried about getting wrapped up in a bigger problem if he didn't work to return a valuable

Does AI understand how rideshare works?  I'm just asking questions.

Hallmark, I'll tell you what - I will go on your payroll to read scripts sent to you and try to figure out if the script makes any sense, and if it does not, I will provide you with solutions to the movie's core problems, such as "that's not how rideshare, apps or computers work".

What's weird is - once Chabert and Man decide to track everyone down, based on vague information shared about where their passengers were headed (there are only 3 passengers to find) - that's the end of the conflict.  After that, it's two people clearly planning on making out at some point for the balance of the run time, which they fill with us watching them run errands (whoopee).  I may be worn out on the enemies-to-lovers trope.  But maybe make it so they do warm up to each other?  See something each needs in their lives?  And explain why the chocolate scientist thinks she should fall for her Lyft driver and vice versa.

I'm often as skeptical of a Hallmark's need to insert drama about saving Cookie Factories or whatever, but... this is just watching two people you don't know perform tasks.  There are no misunderstandings.  There's no issues that crop up.  He's not a flat-earther.  She doesn't try to sign him up for Amway.  And the pacing - when the movie keeps screaming about ticking clocks - never feels urgent.  They stop to make pizzas, and dance in silence and work in a bakery.  They're basically dicking around.

Jamie theorized that maybe the producers felt like the cross-city escapade was all the stress the audience could handle, but there is no stress.  They're just bumbling around, because there's zero consequences to them not finding the ring's owner.  It's clearly an excuse for Chabert to not face the chilly loneliness in her life.  

By the way, in what also feels like it was written by AI, adding *nothing* to the movie, we find our chocolate scientist is mildly allergic to chocolate and so doesn't actually like it.  Which is supposed to be cute, and, I assure you, is not.  It's confusing.  It's like Macauley Culkin working in bee-keeping. 

Also, they *must* bake together - which is apparently a thing all Hallmark fans believe is part of romance.  And this is forced upon them by a cookie emergency paired with a bakery's actual family emergency.  It's so much.  So, so much.  And they'd already made a pizza.

What the movie does have is charm in spades from the two leads, and that may be all anyone is asking for.  Lacey can really sell the idea of her chocolate purses, and has a cute purple dress and a cool jacket.  Man is pretty funny - or at least not the usual Robo-Man we get in these.  He has a certain Bryan Cranston as Tim Whatley appeal.  

Oh, and this movie thinks Manhattan has a Valentine's Day fireworks show.   Does it?  I don't think so.  There's one in Chicago, I read.  But the movie both inserts this fireworks show deep in the back 1/3rd and then makes it absolutely crucial.  Actually, the only thing that matters is inserted super late in the game, and it is amazingly bad script-writing.

The movie ends with our wacky Lyft driver getting a boot on his source of income and instead of seeing that as a problem, he runs across New York to find Chabert, abandoning his car that is also carrying all of his photography equipment.  His entire life is at the hands of the NY traffic cops and instead he runs away from his car to find Chabert instead of, you know, texting her.

Unlike the winery movie, I wasn't actively angry at this movie, but I was confused.  Nothing says these movies need to be this lazy, but... the entire set up requires the audience to have never been in a Lyft or Uber or other rideshare in the past decade.  And the story is *clearly* about two people who are going to @#$% who don't know each other.  Which, ladies and gentlemen, is love.

*I don't know if Chabert intends for people to sit down and eat an entire purse made of chocolate, and - if so - how.  I don't know if it melts or if you try to put your keys in it what happens.  I am so in the weeds on this.