The Princess Switch, and is there such a thing as an objectively bad movie?

As soon as I saw the god-awful trailer to The Princess Switch: Switched Again (2020), I knew I had to see it. I am not ashamed to admit that the original, The Princess Switch (2018), has graced my television screen three times from beginning to end, which is three more times than anyone probably needs to see it.

Besides being a vehicle for Vanessa Hudgens's Very Bad British Accent, The Princess Switch has all the makings of a made-for-TV (and in this case, a made-for-Netflix) movie. It's Christmas, and newly single baker Stacy DeNovo (Hudgens) is whisked off by her sous-chef, Kevin (Nick Sagar), and his adorable daughter, Olivia (Alexa Adeosun), to Belgravia, a non-descript, vaguely European country in the middle of nowhere, to participate in a prestigious baking competition.

Stacy then happens to run into the duchess of Montenaro, Margaret Delacourt (Hudgens), who may as well be her identical twin. Margaret is about to be married to Prince Edward (Sam Palladio), but doesn't really want to be. So, she suggests that she and Stacy switch places, so, you know, Margaret can see how the other side lives for a few days.

It's a tried-and-true formula we've seen a million times. We've seen it in It Takes Two (1995), The Parent Trap (1961), (1998), and the iconic The Lizzie McGuire Movie (2003)—a film that gave us the content we all didn't know we needed: Hilary Duff singing a duet with herself.

Unfortunately, no other film, not even The Princess Switch can offer that level of campy fun. What it does offer is a delightfully chaste and predictable romp of watching two sets of attractive people fall in love during the most magical time of all! Christmas!!

Based on the general standards of what makes movies "good", this movie offers little in the sense of art. The screenplay is decent at best, the cinematography shouldn't win any awards, and while the acting isn't bad per-se (save for Hudgens's aforementioned Very Bad British Accent), the film doesn't demand very much from its actors anyway, so the bar is set pretty low.

By all accounts and measures, this should make The Princess Switch an objectively bad movie. So, is it? And if is, what could possibly possess a grown, fully autonomous adult to watch an objectively bad movie not once, not twice, but three times?

The answer is complicated.

The Princess Switch isn't apologetic about what it is. In fact, it embraces it with such wide-eyed and eager arms that it's almost impossible to not let yourself get a little lost in the wild implausibility of it all. The movie isn't concerned with reality or pragmatism, because there is no room for reality or pragmatism in a film whose entire existence rests on the idea that two Vanessa Hudgens's run into each other and switch places and then fall in love with men in the other Vanessa Hudgens's life.

It doesn't care that all of those elements are ridiculous. In fact, it cares so little about this that it inserts a mysterious Christmas old guy with absolutely no back story, who inexplicably pops up at various points of the film to say foreshadow-y cryptic things or make magical Christmas things happen.

Seriously, who is this guy??

And the movie doesn't care about all this silly stuff, because it doesn't matter to the core of what the movie is: A delightful escape into a world that shouldn't exist.

So yes, even though the plot is silly, and the characters shallow, and the dialogue occasionally cringe-worthy, The Princess Switch achieves what it sets out to do. It creates a film whose foundation is set on a premise that doesn't make any sense, and yet, still manages to weave delight in the familiarity, the earnestness, and the pluck by which it commits to its storylines.

When you measure it against the standards of what critics generally consider a good movie, The Princess Switch passes almost none of the tests. So if it can't be categorized as a good movie, how does it fit into the lexicon of film?

Here's my take: Even if a film is made up almost entirely of "bad" elements, it's too reductive to categorize any singular film as completely "bad". Instead, it's more important to dissect the layers by which we judge any piece of art to understand how these structures dictate how we evaluate taste and how we determine something as "good" or "bad". And something that inspires as much delight and joy as The Princess Switch, even though it appeal to tastes that are seen as more base and less refined than, say, Oscar bait, can hardly be characterized as an objectively bad movie.

And indeed, the way we look at and evaluate film locks specific types of stories outside of the conversation. Joy is seen as producing less artistry than the other scale of emotions. Romance, especially when focused on a female protagonist, is often seen as frivolous and less inspired. So it becomes impossible for a movie like The Princess Switch to be seen as anything other than Bad.

But if you can hop off your high horse for just 100 minutes, maybe you can take a chance and revel in the dizzying delight of a movie that, frankly, doesn't give a darn what you think. Because if there is such a thing as an objectively bad movie, it certainly isn't this one.