Stream It or Skip It: ‘Record Breaking Christmas’ on Lifetime, Wherein Following Rules Makes an Adjudicator a Scrooge

The It’s a Wonderful Lifetime lineup continues with Record Breaking Christmas, a Christmas movie all about three tentpoles of the season: faith, hope, and breaking world records. But does Record Breaking Christmas have what it takes to make history? Or is this just another Lifetime movie about an adjudicator trying to not fall in love?

RECORD BREAKING CHRISTMAS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Michelle Argyris plays Leah, an adjudicator for the World Records Bureau who always gets the honor of overseeing attempts to break Christmas-themed records. This year, Leah and her trainee Jin (Danny Vo) are traveling to the tiny town of St. Drexel, Illinois where a total of six world records will be tested. But Leah doesn’t want newbie Jin to get his hopes up. She’s seen it all in her years as an adjudicator, and she knows that most of these attempts fail.

Spearheading St. Drexel’s mission is a doctor named Devon (Andrew Bushell). His mom helped the town break a record for the world’s largest iced cookie 35 years ago, but all of the tourism that that cookie attracted has long since crumbled. Now all the businesses on Main Street are at risk of closing unless St. Drexel can become known as the home of the most hula hoop spins in one minute by people dressed as reindeer. How will Devon and Leah get along, what with him desperately trying to break records and her desperately trying to adhere to the rules? Where does the rulebook stand on falling in love, hmmm?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: St. Drexel is a town full of Leslie Knopes, all relentless optimists with resting happy face. Also the attention to detail, re: attempts at breaking world records, reminds me of Hallmark’s 2020 movie On the 12th Date of Christmas, which was all about the intricacies of planning a scavenger hunt.

Performance Worth Watching: Of the supporting cast, Danny Vo gives it his all playing Jin, an engineer-turned-adjudicator who is stoked to see records broken and also faints at the sight of beards or the sounds of people singing in unison. Just go with it.

Memorable Dialogue: As Devon says to Leah, “Sometimes you have to give up an important job to live an important life.” There’s also some dialogue that is a blatant, unapologetic commercial for CarMax, but I don’t want to spoil it here.

A Holiday Tradition: Leah ventures forth to adjudicate for holiday records every Christmas, which she does instead of properly celebrating the holiday. And in St. Drexel, the townspeople gather in town hall every Christmas Eve Eve to decorate a town tree together.

Two Turtle Doves: If you can’t get enough of male lead Andrew Bushell, you can catch him as the object of Gabourey Sidibe’s thirst in VH1’s All I Didn’t Want for Christmas.

Does the Title Make Any Sense?: The only way it could make any more sense is if Guinness was somehow involved and they could shove that attention-grabbing name into the title. But Guinness aren’t in the holiday movie game (yet!), so Record Breaking Christmas it is.

Our Take: Record Breaking Christmas is like a carton of eggnog. It is undeniably Christmas-y, movies like it are a staple of the holiday season, it’s definitely an acquired taste that will be off-putting to some, but it goes down smooth for all of us who have a hankering for it.

That is to say, despite being a movie all about breaking records, Record Breaking Christmas isn’t as ambitious as some other holiday romances we’ve seen this season. I’ll give the movie this: the premise is original, as is the way the film turns Leah’s adherence to the rules for her job into a Scrooge-level character flaw, as if she’s opposed to the concept of hope. Instead of just letting some things slide, she’s always going back to the rulebook to see how the World Records Bureau defines concepts like vans, frogs, or kissing. And when Leah has to deliver the news that a local did not break a record, it’s played with the severity of a doctor telling a family that their loved one died in surgery. It’s over-the-top in every way — but so are all of the records that St. Drexel try to break, which makes all of the life-or-death reactions feel more like a wink to the audience than an out-of-touch choice.

But when I say that Record Breaking Christmas goes down smooth, I mean it. If there’s one interesting thing that this film does, it’s that it never lets any of the characters wallow in a misunderstanding. There are a number of them — what’s a holiday movie without Leah thinking Devon has a girlfriend? — but the characters sort out their differences rather quickly. The only real conflict in the movie is whether or not the town will break a record and eventually draw the attention of tourists. Note that no other actions regarding saving Main Street are discussed. It’s breaking records or nothing, baby!

This is what makes Record Breaking Christmas such an eggnog movie. You really do have to have the taste for this kind of goofy, simple movie wherein a character who is afraid of beards and choral singing eagerly tags along to a town obsessed with breaking Christmas records, and you have to buy that two strangers can fall in love in a matter of days — and I’m talking blow-up-your-career levels of love, too. It helps that Record Breaking Christmas has endearing performances (Andrew Bushell has chemistry with everybody, maybe even more with Danny Vo than Michelle Argyris) and festive set decorations, which really spruce things up. It’s eggnog, but at least it’s name brand eggnog.

Our Call: Since I love eggnog and cheesy holiday movies equally, I have to say STREAM IT. It’s not doing anything special, but it’s still satisfying.