Sleigh the competition
The Christmas Classic (2023)
Elizabeth works for her fiancé’s father’s real estate company in the big city. Fed up with Elizabeth’s unprofessional antics, her soon-to-be father-in-law sends her back to her hometown during the holiday season to convince an old flame, Randy, to sell his ski resort to the firm in order to keep her job. Randy agrees to sell, but only if she can win the town’s annual winter challenge, which includes outrageous and fun ski events. Aggravating her plans further, she must face off against the perennial champion, her estranged sister Lynn, now more determined than ever to ‘out-sleigh’ her rivals!
rating 4/10 User rating 13 votes 52% ❄ Christmas Connection
The Christmas Classic is set entirely during the holiday season in a ski-resort town, with the central competition and all its family-drama stakes running on Christmas timing. The title event, the Christmas Classic winter games, is the literal spine of the plot. Without Christmas, there is no movie.
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Our Review
The Christmas Classic arrives with a title that promises something timeless and delivers something closer to a Hallmark Channel episode that got slightly better catering. Directed by Shane Dax Taylor from a screenplay he co-wrote with co-star Austin Nichols, this 86-minute romantic comedy went to theaters and VOD on November 3, 2023, and has since found a second life on Netflix, where its modest ambitions sit more comfortably alongside the rest of the platform's holiday output. The film is not a disaster. It is also not good. What it is, mostly, is a waste of Malin Akerman.
The Setup, Briefly
Akerman plays Elizabeth Bird, a San Francisco real estate professional who gets sent back to her New Mexico hometown by her fiancé's father to close a land deal on a local ski resort. The resort owner is Randy Collins (Ryan Hansen), her ex-boyfriend from a decade ago, which is the kind of coincidence that holiday movies use as a given. Randy will only sell if Elizabeth wins the town's annual Christmas Classic competition, a series of winter events that her estranged sister Lynn (Amy Smart) has dominated for nine consecutive years.
The structure is borrowed from every sports-adjacent romantic comedy you have already seen. There is a ticking deadline, a villain in a suit, a quirky local community, and a lead character who needs to rediscover what she gave up when she chased ambition. The film does not deviate from this blueprint at any point, which creates a kind of ambient predictability that settles over proceedings like fresh powder: pleasant enough to look at, numbing if you stay too long.
What The Cast Does With It
Akerman, born in Stockholm and raised in Toronto, has been reliably better than her material for most of her career. She played Silk Spectre II in Zack Snyder's Watchmen in 2009, held her own opposite Damian Lewis across four seasons of Billions, and has a gift for physical comedy that most directors never think to use. Here, Taylor asks her to react to ski gear, look flustered, and pine at mountain vistas. She does all of this competently. Competently is a word that appears often in the vocabulary of any honest Christmas Classic review.
Ryan Hansen, best known for playing Dick Casablancas across all iterations of Veronica Mars and as the lead of Party Down on Starz, brings a loose, likable energy to Randy that the script barely earns. He and Akerman have chemistry in the sense that two professionally charming people placed near each other will tend to generate warmth, even without much written support.
Amy Smart is the real casualty. As the antagonist sister Lynn, she is given a character defined almost entirely by competitive pettiness, with a final-act softening that arrives too fast to feel genuine. Smart was sharp and funny in Roger Kumble's Just Friends in 2005, a genuinely better holiday film. Eighteen years later, she is here to scowl and then abruptly not scowl. It is not her finest hour.
Austin Nichols, who co-wrote the screenplay, plays Bynn Flynn, the fiancé's representative and designated obstacle. In the interview circuit, Nichols said he deliberately wrote his character to have a satisfying arc rather than just be an obstructed punchline. You can see the intention. Whether the execution got there is a different question.
Ruidoso, the Unsung Lead
The production filmed in and around Ruidoso, New Mexico in March 2023, using Ski Apache as the primary mountain location. Ski Apache is owned and operated by the Mescalero Apache Tribe, has a summit elevation of 11,500 feet, and is the southernmost major ski resort in the United States, operating at roughly the same latitude as Charleston, South Carolina. The New Mexico Film Office reported that the production employed 80 local workers: 38 crew, 30 background performers, and 12 principal actors.
This is where the film genuinely earns something. The mountain scenery in The Christmas Classic is legitimately beautiful. Sierra Blanca's slopes photograph well, the winter light has a quality you do not get in the artificial snowscapes of so many studio Christmas productions, and the choice to shoot on location rather than a backlot gives the film a visual texture its story never quite matches. If you visit Ruidoso after watching this, you will not feel deceived.
The Competition, Such As It Is
The Christmas Classic competition itself, the centerpiece of the third act, involves a series of winter sports events that the film describes with more enthusiasm than specificity. The events are meant to be outrageous and physically demanding. They read on screen as moderately taxing recreational activities. The climactic showdown between Elizabeth and Lynn carries no real weight because the rules of the competition are never established clearly enough for the audience to understand the stakes.
This is the screenplay's core structural failure. The competition should feel like something to win or lose. Instead it functions as set decoration for character moments that could happen anywhere. Taylor and Nichols are clearly more interested in the family-reconciliation plot than the sporting one. That is fine, but it means the movie promises a contest and delivers a conversation.
A Note on the "Classic" in the Title
The title does double duty: it refers to the competition and signals an aspiration for the film itself. The Christmas Classic wants to be one of those movies people return to annually, the kind that earns the noun naturally over time. Home Alone became a classic because it was specific, brutal, and genuinely funny. Elf became a classic because Will Ferrell was committed to an absurdist bit that paid off completely. The Christmas Classic has Malin Akerman being slightly embarrassed in ski boots. These are not the same things.
The film is not without warmth. The family dynamics between Elizabeth and Lynn, when the script slows down enough to let them breathe, hint at something more interesting beneath the formula. Akerman and Smart have a scene near the end that briefly suggests what this movie could have been if it had trusted its characters more than its plot mechanics.
Still: four out of ten. The mountains are better than the movie. Go visit Ruidoso. The Ski Apache gondola is the only true gondola lift in all of New Mexico.
Fun Facts
The Christmas Classic was filmed in and around Ruidoso, New Mexico in March 2023, using Ski Apache as the primary mountain location. Ski Apache sits at a summit elevation of 11,500 feet and is owned and operated by the Mescalero Apache Tribe, which has run the resort since 1963.
Co-writer Austin Nichols also appeared on screen as the character Bynn Flynn, the fiancé's representative. He stated in interviews that he deliberately expanded the role to give the character a satisfying resolution rather than functioning purely as an obstacle throughout.
The production employed 80 New Mexico residents during filming: 38 crew members, 30 background performers, and 12 principal actors, according to the New Mexico Film Office.
Ski Apache, the resort used as a filming location, is the southernmost major ski area in the United States, operating at approximately the same latitude as Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia.
Amy Smart, who plays antagonist sister Lynn, appeared in Just Friends in 2005 opposite Ryan Reynolds. That film, also a Christmas romantic comedy, was shot partly in Montreal and grossed $32.6 million at the domestic box office.
Malin Akerman was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1978 and moved to Toronto at age two. At 17, she won the Canadian title in the Ford Supermodel competition, spending three years modeling in Europe before pivoting to acting.
Ryan Hansen, who plays love interest Randy, originally gained recognition as Dick Casablancas on the UPN/CW series Veronica Mars, a role he reprised in the 2014 Kickstarter-funded film and again in the 2019 Hulu revival.
The film was distributed by Quiver Distribution on November 3, 2023, releasing simultaneously in limited theaters and on video on demand. It later became available on Netflix, significantly expanding its audience more than a year after its original release.
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