Spring Breakthrough brings a little bit of family drama to Hallmark’s spring movie lineup. What happens when you get fired unexpectedly and then your daughter immediately announces that she’s engaged? Monica Rollins (Keesha Sharp) is about to find out, but is her big, mid-life breakthrough worth streaming or skipping?
The Gist: Keesha Sharp (Lethal Weapon, Are We There Yet?), plays Monica Rollins, the Senior VP of Development at Chicago’s Windy City Youth Center. She’s professional, mature, and totally ready for a promotion — until some young busybody with social media know-how comes and steals her job right out from under her. Not only is Keesha suddenly without a job, she finds out that her daughter Vivian (Empire’s Rhyon Nicole Brown) is engaged to be married. The parents of the groom whisk both families away on a Gulf Shore vacation to get to know each other — but Monica low-key has sabotage on her mind.
She also has romance on her mind, even if she’s not willing to admit it. That’s because she keeps bumping into the handsome Clark (Fear the Walking Dead’s Demetrius Grosse) — who turns out to be her future son-in-law’s godfather. How will Monica deal with losing her job, sharing her daughter, and finding unexpected love all at once? Sounds like someone is headed for a breakthrough or a breakdown.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The merging families and midlife romance makes Spring Breakthrough feel like half Meet the Parents and half How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
Performance Worth Watching: While everyone else is going through it, Laticia A. King and Charlie Q. Smith lighten the mood and bring some laughs as Denise and Sierra, the BFFs of mother and daughter Rollins.
Memorable Dialogue: When Monica tries to impart some old-fashioned marketing wisdom on social-media-minded Sierra, she replies, “Miss Rollins, nobody reads anymore.”
Our Take: Spring Breakthrough feels like two movies in one, both centered around the absolutely fantastic Keesha Sharp. The first is Monica’s love story with the charming Clark, a surprise development that pushes the newly jobless Monica in a new direction. The other movie focuses on Monica’s relationship with her daughter Vivian, a relationship that Monica thought was solid until she found out that Vivian is engaged to a man she didn’t even know existed. These are both great ideas, but the movie struggles to bring them together to form a cohesive narrative.
The clearest example of this involves Monica’s job, which she loses in the opening scene — and then it’s almost 20 minutes until that plot point matters again. I wasn’t sure why Monica wasn’t telling Vivian about losing her job, but I also wasn’t sure if Monica was keeping it a secret either. It felt like the movie had two modes: Monica & Clark or Monica & Vivian. There’s a lot of untapped potential here, as the movie could’ve really dug into Monica’s need to force a level of perfection onto her daughter that she can’t even maintain for herself. Imagine Monica actually sneaking around and hooking up with Clark while chastising Vivian for rushing into marriage, and Monica pressuring Vivian’s fiancé Shawn (All American’s Akono Dixon) into coming up with a five-year plan when her own plan just imploded. There’s a whole lot of fun that could’ve been had with these two plots, but instead of getting one fulfilling whole we get two incomplete halves.
All that out of the way, I will commend the entire cast for really turning it out in this movie. While the story didn’t totally come together, the performances throughout were nuanced and deep. Sharp and Brown are wonderful as mother and daughter, and Grosse is able to work magic with any scene partner. I also really loved seeing Sharp play Monica’s unintentional silliness, like the fact that she took an online course to prep for her golf lesson and still had no idea what she was doing. The cast delivered.
That’s why I watched Spring Breakthrough actually wishing that it was longer — like maybe a mini-series of six half-hour episodes. Then we would’ve had time to get into all of the plot points (you can’t say that Clark is an expert in superstitions and then drop it!) and give this cast room to really play.
Our Call: While it’s not a must-see and the plot wanders off-track as the movie progresses, I’m still leaning towards STREAM IT because the cast is so good. Plus we really need to convince Hallmark to make Keesha Sharp one of the network’s perennial holiday movie leads.