by Jake Bourgeois, Contributing Writer
When it comes to the movie calendar, August and January get a lot of hate for being the dumping grounds of movies. September isn’t much better — particularly given all the current shakeups, and with the studios and streamers playing hardball with paying their talent.
With choices fairly limited, risks are necessitated to get our cinematic fill. Risks like, I like Haley Lu Richardson. So, sure, I’ll take a chance on a Netflix rom-com literally called Love at First Sight about Richardson as the daughter of a professor who moved to England and is getting remarried. Then, en route to this transatlantic wedding, she misses her flight, connects with a stats-obsessed stranger (Ben Hardy), falls in love, and works to beat the odds to reconnect in one of the world’s most crowded cities before the chance at true love is lost forever.
The determining factors on whether you enjoy this rom-com are far simpler than the reasons you may not, so let’s start there.
With rom-coms, it’s pretty simple: Do you buy in to the relationship they want you to root for? If the answer is yes, you’re probably going to have a good time — and I had a smile on my face for most of the 93-minute runtime.
Look, I went into this thing having looked at the title and watched the trailer. So there was a bit of healthy side-eye and skepticism that I was going to be able to be sucked in and give myself to a movie that plays the hits. But here’s the other thing: I’m also discovering as I age that I’m a bit of a secret sap. I couldn’t help myself. The duo of Richardson and Hardy are adorable, and it works, despite the litany of reasons it shouldn’t. They’re even set up like so many other couples in these movies are — seemingly polar opposites that bond over a shared commonality.
I mean, even the premise is as formulaic as it gets. Love at first sight? I roll my eyes when a plethora of other movies do the same old move. So why does it work here? I have no idea, but it just does. Sure, bonding over an airport meal and being in close quarters for a lengthy flight do a lot of work to get us to buy in to the rapidly made connection, but when they want us to feel those sparks between them, I’ll be damned if it didn’t work.
Rom-coms are supposed to make you cry, give you the warm and fuzzies, or both. So, at the very base level, it works. Hell, I’m still giddy in the aftermath as I type up this review.
Having said that, there are a lot of crutches of the genre that it relies on that may rub you the wrong way if you’re not as enamored with our leading couple.
I hope you like narration, because there’s a lot of it. Who knows, it might be a feature of the original novel, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith, but it does feature quite heavily in both setting up and navigating us through the story of the movie. I get, given the title of the book it was based on, the role statistics play in the narrative, but after having it read to repeatedly, it does get a little tired. Our narrator (Jameela Jamil) also plays a slightly befuddling role in the film, showing up as multiple characters throughout. I get the sense that she’s supposed to be some sort of personification of fate, but I still found myself slightly confused by her continued presence — not unlike Richardson’s own character, who gives her a double-take on a couple of occasions.
Aside from that, there are a couple of rom-com standbys that irked me a bit more than the overall premise, which I was able to largely overlook. Oddly enough, given its short run time, it tries to play a will-they-won’t-they game a bit in the third act. While I get it helps bring all the narrative beats full circle, I did find myself rolling my eyes a bit as it stretched things along. Another is that I get that updated/slowed down covers have been in vogue for years, but for me, maybe if what you’re trying to cover (on multiple occasions) is a Whitney Houston classic, just leave it alone.
This film puts a lot into a simple calculation: the probability that your investment in the main relationship will overcome any qualms you may have with the reliance on a tried-and-true formula. That’s a problem audience members will have to solve for themselves.
In my case, there are so many reasons this movie full of rom-com clichés should annoy me, but this stupid smile on my face won’t go away.
Rating: Liked It
Love at First Sight is currently streaming on Netflix
You can read more from Jake Bourgeois, and follow him on Twitter and Letterboxd