by Scott Batchelor, Contributing Writer
Counter programming is not a novel idea. When one big tentpole movie comes out, it is either the only new wide release, or a movie of a completely different genre comes out to attract a different audience. In this case, Love Again is trying to appeal to a certain demographic not enthralled with the MCU’s Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3. But I don’t think that gives it an excuse to be so sloppy and lazy. Priyanka Chopra Jonas gives it her all as Mira, a woman still grieving for her boyfriend after two years. As does Sam Heughan as Rob. But not together. Their chemistry does not have the magic charm to make me care about their relationship. But that very well may be because it’s hard to root for Rob when he doesn’t do or say a single thing someone not playing a character in a romantic comedy would do or say.
But that’s for later. The movie starts off on the wrong foot by being as generic as a romcom can be. Mira and her soon-to-be-dead boyfriend, John, (Arinzé Kene) greet each other by pretending to not know each other. Lazy. Just lazy. I’ve seen this in just about every movie ever. It’s not cute anymore. Maybe in the early 2000s. But it needs to stop.
They have a bit of a flirty back-and-forth that feels unnatural, before his immediate departure to the afterlife. The death is not shown, but we do see Mira react to watching the love of her life get run over by a drunk driver. A bit brutal, but not out of nowhere if you read the synopsis. And actually, this whole scene could have been cut. It really doesn’t add anything but minutes to a runtime that desperately doesn’t need it. We jump to two years later and learn everything we needed to know. Mira now lives with her parents, and they want her to move back in with her sister Suzy (Sofia Barclay), which she does after many voicemails demanding she move on already.
We are then introduced to Rob. He oddly still has notifications on for when his ex posts anything to an unidentified social media platform. Also, he wants to start a podcast, and he likes basketball. And… I think that is all there is to know about the guy who is supposed to charm us into caring about this relationship. He is somehow tasked with going to write an article about Céline Dion, despite not knowing anything about Céline Dion. Dion gets to play a bit of an exaggerated version of herself, who also acts as a love therapist to Rob throughout his stalking and lying to court a woman. This would have made so much more sense if they had just kept the rumored title, It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.
Mira gets advice to “talk” to John, so she sends a text to his old phone number, which just happened to be reissued to Rob. Upon getting these texts, Rob reads them and does nothing about it. These are clearly thought-out love messages, and instead of replying and letting the other person know he is not the recipient, he just keeps reading them. At this point, he does not know John is dead. Mira may be trying to reach out to an old flame, and is obviously hurting. But this lump on a log decides to use the messages to stalk her.
Mira texts the number about everything that is going on in her life; Rob uses this as a means to find out where she will be. After tracking her to a restaurant to learn what she looks like, he runs into her at an opera house, casually chats with her, and is able to get her number.
They hit it off nicely, of course, and bond over shoes and weird eating habits like the kooky concept of putting french fries ON the burger! Our leads have forced conversations to try and endear them to us, but the acting is wooden and very community theater. The dialogue is uninspired and brings nothing to the table. Mira reveals how John dies, reaffirming that we didn’t need the opening scene. They try to make a weird basketball analogy on how it represents life, but it’s incoherent and lacks any real depth. The date goes well — they spend the whole night just chatting, and when they part ways, they are very much smitten. We then move on from questioning, “Is he stalking her?” (yes) to, “Should he tell her how he found her?” (also yes). We are now on the rails towards predictability, and the remainder of the film can be summarized as unsatisfactory, to say the least.
Love Again is certainly a story to tell about how to get back to dating after losing your partner tragically, but it goes in a weird direction. There could have been something sweet if we didn’t do the “liar revealed” trope. If Rob responded to the first set of texts and set up a date that way, we could have had a very powerful movie about what it means to move on from losing a partner. But sadly, we get an unoriginal movie that hits every predictable story beat, and provides us with nothing real to root for. I did chuckle at a couple of lines of dialogue, so this is not the worst movie I have ever seen, but I can’t put a stamp of recommendation on it.
Score: 3/10
Love Again is currently playing in theaters
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