Touched By A 'Christmas Angel'

"I'm not an angel." Della Reese, arguably one of TV's most famous angels from her nine-year stint on one of my favorite TV shows, "Touched By An Angel", barks this at a curious little girl several times in what is certainly not the first and probably not the last movie called "Christmas Angel" (2012). The little girl lives with her single and happy that way mother (Teri Polo, from the "Meet the Parents" films) across the street from a decrepit house with boarded up windows and a strange glow coming from behind the boards. Reese's character, a grumpy former jazz diva, a role I've seen her play on episodes of TV's "Picket Fences" and "That's So Raven" (two more favorite shows of mine), lives inside the otherwise uninhabited eyesore. The young girl, Olivia, convinces her friend and classmates to place wishes in a self-created box outside of the house and those wishes will come true in time for Christmas. Her own personal Christmas wish is that her mother will get a husband. Her fiercely independent, sports-loving mom doesn't really show any interest in finding anyone, until a doctor (Kevin Sorbo, formerly TV's Hercules) shows up. He owns the house with the strange glow, the one that appears to be granting wishes. Olivia's friend, Lucas, tries to plead Dr. Nathan's case, saying "he's a doctor, I thought girls liked doctors", but Olivia sets her sights on other men for her mom until realizing Nathan just may be the one. Nathan comes with his own baggage, past and present, that prevents him from truly wooing Olivia's mom, which feeds Olivia's own mistrust of the man. The movie was less than two hours long, but I thought it crammed a lot of small subplots and characters into that time and most of them didn't get resolved or if they did, it was all too quickly before the credits rolled.  Issues like alcoholism, throat cancer, kidney transplants and a mother-daughter reunion took place, but most of these themes seemed unnecessary to me when compared with the larger story of the mysterious house and the wishes that were being granted. I won't give anything away by saying which specific characters were affected by these issues. The actress who played Olivia, Izabela Vidovic, gave a great performance, I thought, and I usually don't like the performances of child actors, especially in sentimental Christmas movies like this one. Della Reese got to sing a little bit in this movie, which is something I always enjoyed when she did it on "Touched By An Angel." This was a good movie and one that apparently aired on the same Christian TV network as "The Heart of Christmas" (2011), which I watched last week. God is mentioned in this movie several times, including by Reese, which coupled with the angel talk made me have major "Touched By An Angel" deja vu. Several characters also hold hands and say grace before eating and Olivia prays before drifting off to sleep. It doesn't get any more wholesome and family friendly than that.