When you can’t travel around the world at least there’s the Hallmark Channel’s Passport to Love series, shot on location in beautiful cities across the world, to inspire us. This week’s entry, A Machu Picchu Proposal is a charming, fun, occasionally farce-like romance about a woman named Katie who goes to Peru to help her twin brother plan an idyllic proposal to his girlfriend, but everything that can go wrong does. As the siblings keep trying – and failing – to create the perfect setting, sparks fly between Katie and Carlos, a chef she meets along the way.
Opening Shot: A woman stands behind a counter tasting the food she has cooked in several pots – she runs a cooking school and is recipe testing for upcoming classes.
The Gist: Katie (Rhiannon Fish) had planned to spend her summer preparing for the cooking class she’s teaching in the fall, but her twin brother Dan (Christopher Vieira) changes her mind when he invites her to Peru to spend time with him and his girlfriend Luciana (Michelle Rosello), who he plans to propose to. Dan and Katie are both Type A planners, never met a spreadsheet they didn’t love, so he asks for her help to create the perfect proposal at Machu Picchu.
When they arrive to Cusco, Dan’s girlfriend Luciana introduces them to her friend Carlos (Alec Santos), a chef. Almost as soon as they arrive, Carlos tells them he’s arranged for them to take a VIP guided tour of Machu Picchu, the beautiful, ancient Incan city in the mountains. Under any other circumstances, this would be great but Dan had planned for his proposal to take place in Machu Picchu in a few days, and this is going to throw off his entire plan and the whole trip. Dan is hilariously awkward, almost devolving into Mr. Bean levels of discomfort and weird behavior, a combination of altitude sickness and his allergy to spontaneity, so he starts to spiral about when he’ll another chance to propose.
Dan asks Katie to head out on an excursion with Carlos to scout out some other beautiful locations in Peru where Dan might be able to create the most perfect proposal of all time. Carlos doesn’t realize the purpose of the trip, because Dan is trying to keep the proposal a surprise, and Katie explains that she’s trying to help him discover new ingredients he can use in his cooking. At every turn, some problem arises: Dan has a reaction to some especially “fibrous” alpaca milk he chugs, the ring falls in a vat of melted chocolate and gets turned into dessert. You know, typical stuff. Eventually, Carlos catches on that Katie is trying to plan something for Dan and Luciana, and it endears him to her.
Katie and Dan have a huge argument when he learns that Carlos knows about the surprise, but the temporary rift is mended when Katie borrows some of Carlos’s chill vibes and helps come up with the perfect proposal after all, winning over Carlos in the process.
Our Take: Katie and Dan are twins who think alike – they’re both nerdy to the Nth degree, and prefer to live structured lives. The fact that Katie accepted Dan’s spontaneous invitation to Peru in the first place seems out of character. Katie’s rigidity is the perfect foil to Carlos, whose preferred method of travel is flying by the seat of his pants. When Katie says stuff like, “This isn’t part of the plan,” he says chill stuff like, “It’s the journey, not the destination.” It would be infuriating in real life, but here, Santos plays Carlos so casual and breezy, it’s just fun to watch. But a romantic spark also takes quite a while to get to, the romantic leads are both charming but the romance feels more understated than what we, uh, Hallmaniacs are used to. (Is there an actual, better term for Hallmark fans?)
The movie is more fun and interesting when it leans into Katie and Dan’s madcap adventure, trying to come up with the best proposal possible. If the romantic aspect of the film was simply that – Dan’s quest to create a magical moment for Luciana – the movie could have been just as successful, honestly. But that’s the thing about Hallmark movies, to keep from being formulaic, sometimes when they lean into aspects beyond the traditional love story, they succeed in other ways and are that much more satisfying as a result.
Parting Shot: At a party celebrating Dan and Lucy’s proposal, Carlos asks Katie, “Will you dance with me?” to which she responds, “Yes, chef.”
Performance Worth Watching: The brother-sister chemistry isn’t usually the dynamic that steals the show in a rom-com, but Fish and Vieira are a great comic team, heightening each other’s nerdiness and anxious traits.
Memorable Dialogue: “I don’t like messing with an itinerary,” Katie tells Carlos when he asks her to be spontaneous and go for a hike. This response is a hilarious way to tell someone your boundaries.
Our Call: A Machu Picchu Proposal is an above-average offering from Hallmark; while the romance doesn’t hit you over the head, it’s filled with genuinely funny moments and unique characters that are delightfully weird, all set amid a truly gorgeous setting. STREAM IT!
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.