"Love always triumphs in the end."
Hello everyone!
Welcome, officially, to the December weeks of movie blog posts in which I take the time to look at what this holiday season has to offer us.
Thus far, we're looking at a pretty darn good start all in all!
Last week, we started with the book review, which we thoroughly enjoyed, and this week, well.
This week is a VERY good movie, shall we say.
I wasn't entirely sure whether or not it would be, given Hallmark occasionally has moments when you're wondering who in their right mind approved a script like that, but I can't say much about this one.
In fact, I was VERY pleasantly surprised!
The Royal Nanny took a fairly traditional story and stood it on its head. And I loved it!
I'll be linking the rather general Christmas search down at the bottom of the page, as always.
Let's not dawdle and have a look, shall we?
Our movie opens with a group of MI7 agents trying to circle around and box in, though you don't know who or what until you see a woman with a Christmas package. They get the package, but not the woman, who instead informs someone that MI7 'took the bait'.
The package turns out to contain security protocols for Kensington palace, and so with that immediate threat, Claire (Rachel Skarsten) and her work partner are sent to the palace undercover to protect the Crown Princess and her two children. The partner, coincidentally a family man, will be working as part of the amped up security, while Claire will work as the royal nanny.
The kicker here is that Claire has NO experience with children whatsoever!
But it is what it is, and after pleading with the Lansbury School for Nannies headmistress, she finally gets a rapid-fire course in becoming one, which includes but is not limited to a uniform and always carrying an umbrella with her.
Then she's sent to Kensington itself, where the children very obviously try to scare her off, but given she's an MI7 agent that hardly works, so they enlist the help of their uncle Colin, the Harry of this movie I suppose, who for some unknown reason seems to also delight in tormenting nannies but never got anyone to tell him off.
Well, Claire foils him, too, dropping the bucket of pasta onto HIS head instead of the other way around.
Initially, the children take a bit to warm up to her, but she wins them over with a couple neat tricks and pranks, as well as organizing a call to their absentee RAF father, all the while trying to keep a lookout. The MI7 team keep finding leads pointing back to Colin as either the perpetrator behind the threats or the target, but the more time Claire spends with him, seeing his genuine love for the children and his sister, the less she believes that.
She and Colin finally also start bonding, especially over his Christmas charity during which she manages to convince a Scrooge character to make up the difference of what the charity's still missing, appealing to his vanity and pride that HE needs to be the one to pay the most (not sure if that's what they were going for, but it certainly turned out that way lol).
And when she successfully grounds a plane to prevent the older royals from leaving, Claire and Colin have a stroll through the decorated gardens together while the princess spends time with her children.
The net seems to be closing in, however, though Claire still doesn't understand why it would be Colin, even when he's supposedly brought in for questioning. He's even generous enough to invite her to the royal ball which is hosted for the charity itself, where we get the chance to see Rachel Skarsten in a gorgeous red dress, but someone needed to do something about her hair, I'm so sorry.
EITHER WAY, the prince is smitten, and she's finding it hard to keep him at arm's length to do her job, when disaster strikes as they're all delivering presents on behalf of the Crown Princess, to the orphanage Claire herself used to live in, actually (yep, they sent an orphan to be a nanny!).
The group of kidnappers finally makes their move, exposing that they know Claire's real name as she deftly uses her umbrella to get the children to the van, in my favourite scene of the movie where she's ordered to give up the children and they won't hurt the prince, to which Colin furiously snarls out DON'T YOU DARE! Deftly showing without a doubt it can't be him, since he's willing to have himself taken if his niece and nephew are spared.
Claire reveals her true identity to the princess, and said princess then takes one look at the overbearing, insulting and frankly annoying head agent who's trying to relieve Claire of duty, and kicks him and his entire entourage out.
It's revealed that Colin's bodyguard was also taken, surprisingly, and while the boss keeps on trying to shoehorn the Colin idea in, Claire stands up to him saying it just doesn't fit and he's trying too hard.
This gets her dismissed, so she goes to the nanny headmistress - who used to be Colin's nanny, actually - explaining her predicament. The headmistress shows her a video she was sent from one of her own informants (the nannies she's trained keep her appraised of everything happening in the city) which reveals that Colin's bodyguard was in on it all along, having served in the military and MI7 with the two other kidnappers, before they were all decommissioned and their service was erased.
Making them prime suspects for off the books and ghost missions.
Given that the kidnappers are demanding millions of dollars in crypto currency, Claire and the headmistress suspect that whoever was behind this has to be in MI7 itself, to place blame on a royal AND show the PM that MI7 is indispensable in solving these problems, as there's chatter of merging it with another agency.
Emboldened, Claire calls on her MI7 friends for help and they head down to the warehouse where Colin's being kept, rescuing him, and eventually arresting their MI7 boss, who's been behind this all along.
To end matters, Colin's abduction also triggered a security protocol which brings the children's father home in time for Christmas, something all the royals wished for back at a wishing well, but Claire wished to spend Christmas with the royal family, even if as their nanny, because she's grown so fond of them.
And with a phone call from the King himself, inviting her to Sandringham House, as well as the Crown Princess pointing out her brother better be as smart as he says he is and make it official soon, Claire and Colin finally kiss, and we get our happily ever after.
The end!
Fun, intelligently written, and vastly entertaining with those umbrella sequences, The Royal Nanny is a little bit off-the-books when it comes to its plotline, using the mystery to drive the plot rather than the romance, which serves it TREMENDOUSLY well. We've all seen hundreds of movies where a random girl becomes the nanny, but I feel like this is one of the only ones where the nanny's goal isn't to become the perfect nanny, but rather something else.
Rachel and Dan Jeannotte also sell their roles really, really well, and it helps that they starred together in Reign back in the day, because they have a chemistry immediately rather than needing to build it over time.
All in all, with emphasis on suspense and mystery and with the sprinkling of romance acting as the icing on the cake, The Royal Nanny is one of the movies to absolutely watch this holiday season. I definitely enjoyed it more than I've enjoyed some of the others!
Plus, it's super endearing to watch the prince be all bashful and tongue-tied, with Claire the confident, sophisticated one.
It's not exactly Agatha Christie, but it IS good enough. So why not give it a go?
xx
*images and video not mine
**there seems to be some confusion whether Claire is MI5 or MI7, but given that the whole time, the movie keeps referring to MI7, I think that's the bottom line
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