Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Real West’ on Hallmark Channel, Where A Hot Widow Moves On With Her Life With A Grizzled, Sexy Cowboy On Vacation

The Real West on the Hallmark Channel is the story of a widowed mom of two who gets her groove back after a vacation on a dude ranch where she meets a sexy cowboy. The film is filled with lived-in characters who are funny and warm, and while the romantic hijinks are at the center of it all, there’s also a heart-wrenching arc around the unspoken grief that the mother and her children have endured after the loss of their husband and father. Often funny with flecks of poignancy, it’s solid entry in the Hallmark canon, to be sure.

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Apartment 7A’ on Paramount+, the ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Prequel We Know We Didn’t Need

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Oddity’ on Shudder, a Fascinating Horror Mashup About a Blind Psychic and her Creepy Mannequin Pal

Opening Shot: An alarm clock goes off at 5 a.m. and Rebecca (Kimberley Sustad) doesn’t even hit the snooze button. Instead, she goes out for a morning run, and next thing we know, she’s cooking breakfast for her two sons and explaining that they’ve got to get a move on in order to get on the road for their family ranch vacation. Rebecca is very much an early bird who catches the worm.

The Gist: Rebecca’s defining traits are that she’s a professor in Boulder (she’s a professor of “the Old West,”) and she’s been a widow for three years. (“I jog. And recycle,” she says when asked about her hobbies.) As her older son, Noah (Nicholas Holmes), tells her, “You’re awesome, but it’s been three years since dad died. It could be good to make some friends who aren’t, y’know, your kids.” It always fall to the eldest to provide the exposition, doesn’t it?

CLICK HERE TO GET EMAILS FROM DECIDER

Noah, a high school student, is applying for colleges and Rebecca wants them to take one big family trip to a cattle ranch before he goes to school, but she’s blindsided when he secretly invites his girlfriend Jasmine on the trip. Rebecca is annoyed, but in that good-natured way that Hallmark protagonists are, a sort of zen woosah I personally will never know. Rebecca’s excited for this trip because her sister, Cassidy (Marlie Collins) and her mom Maureen (Lynda Boyd) are coming, too, but Cassidy, like Noah, has gone off script because it turns out that her new beau is also there. [CUT TO: Rebecca’s good-natured annoyance grows. ]

When Rebecca decides to go out and buy a cowboy hat for too look the part on this vacation, she meets a gruff-seeming cowboy named Jake West (Lucas Bryant) who immediately intrigues her when he claims he can read people, and as he describes her to a T just by sizing her up with his rugged, sexy eyes. Rebecca is dazzled by his quiet confidence so they grab a coffee. Though Jake doesn’t stay long enough to reveal very much about himself, but Rebecca is clearly smitten by this mysterious stranger. She goes back to the ranch to tell Cassidy and Maureen that she met someone charming, and that’s when Cassidy is like, hold up, my boyfriend just got here. [CUT TO: The boyfriend is Jake!! ] Cassidy’s like, “Everyone, meet Jake.” Rebecca’s like, “Ahem. Nice to, ‘ meet you ,’ Jake.”

Over the next day or two, Rebecca tries to distance herself from Jake because she’s not the type to steal her own sister’s man, but for reasons that only exist in movies like this, Cassidy insists that Rebecca get to know Jake one-on-one so Rebecca can report back if Jake seems like The One. This is obviously bad news for Cassidy because the chemistry between Rebecca and Jake is off the charts and both of them start having sexy dreams about each other and it’s probably the only time I’ve ever seen actual open-mouth, wet kisses in a Hallmark movie, even though they’re just, like, hallucinations? [CUT TO: Me, scandalized. ]

There are a few obstacles in Rebecca and Jake’s way; Cassidy, for one, plus the fact that Maureen tries to set Rebecca up with an old classmate from her hometown, Bobby. The gold nuggets of drama that are panned from these plot streams are fairly predictable, right up to the moment that Rebecca and Jake get together in the end.

Our Take: For the majority of the time that I was watching The Real West , I was delighted by how breezy and charming it all was. Every character, from pragmatic but funny Rebecca to wise but elusive Jake to flighty but supportive Cassidy was fully realized and their characters were likeable and fully-formed. While, sure, the main drama of the film surrounds Rebecca’s quiet resignation over the fact that the man she’s pining for is dating her sister, with this being a Hallmark movie, you always knew that in the end, she’d get her man. What I didn’t expect was the emotional resonance that arose from a scene with Rebecca’s younger son, Ollie (Azriel Dalman).

It turns out, Rebecca’s life wasn’t the only one upended by her husband’s sudden death three years earlier. Late in the movie, Ollie, an average kid with an obsession with ghosts, runs away without telling anyone to go on a “ghost hunt” at the ranch. When he’s found (by Jake, of course), he explains that he was desperate to find a ghost because if it turns out ghosts are real, maybe then he’d be able to see his father again. Oof. Rebecca may have been hesitant to move on and look for love again, but to see her son struggling too makes her realizing that maybe moving forward will be a good thing for all of them. It’s not just one of those throwaway dramatic arcs but a catalyst for change – this is the moment she realizes she needs to grab the reins to her happiness (literally – she rides a horse out to meet Jake and declare her love). Thanks to the excellent casting and nuanced dialogue, what could have been predictable and sappy turns out to be wonderfully warm and funny romance.

Parting Shot: Rebecca, Jake, and her family all dance together at a final end-of-the-week hoedown.

Performance Worth Watching: Linda Boyd, who plays Rebecca’s mother Maureen, infuses every line reading with gleeful humor. The movie has quite a few solid comedic performances, but hers is naturalistic and expertly delivered and it rises to the top.

Memorable Dialogue: “Nothing worth having comes without risk.” “I like to take things as they come. Life is never what you expect it to be but that’s what makes it interesting.” Jake is typically a quiet man, but he tends to speaks in pithy maxims that sound like fortune cookies.

Our Call: STREAM IT! The Real West is one of the better Hallmark romances I’ve seen this year, and I’ve seen a lot. Blending humor with tenderness and filled with characters that are lovable and not cloying, it’s two hours well spent.

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 .

For more entertainment news and streaming recommendations, visit decider.com