Movie Review: What’s Love Got to Do With It

 Michael’s Movie Grade: D-

A bland and overly familiar romantic comedy. 

The idea of a romantic comedy that takes a look at Arranged (or assisted marriage) is a great one and almost demands to provide something new in this often creatively dry genre. Unfortunately once you get past that basic idea, this movie is simply the same old same old. There is no intelligent discussion of the topic or any kind of subversive look at the romantic comedy. Instead there is simply the old romantic comedy conventions that every movie fan knows all too well. However conventional romantic comedies do have their charms and there is a reason why so many movie fans still like them. Unfortunately though those charms are absent here, and we get a film that is neither romantic or funny. In fact this film commits the worst sin that a romantic comedy can commit. That is that the two lead characters have no chemistry with each other. In fact none of the characters have that good of chemistry with each other. It of course doesn’t help how simply boring these characters are and the fact that their entire personalities consist of nothing but clichés. This causes us not to care who ends up with who and if we don’t care about that in a romantic comedy than we don’t care about the story at all. One can see the ending of this movie coming from a mile away but when it happens it seems hard to actually care. This ending actually feels forced and unnatural like the filmmakers were just dutifully providing us with the obvious ending, rather than said ending coming naturally out of the story or characters. The humor in this movie is not much better. Despite this film being full of comedy, I can't think of one time I laughed for the whole picture. Every single joke simply fell flat for me and some of it was kind of painfully. This movie also suffers from plenty of horrible dialogue that sounds forced and not at all like how people actually talk. The worst part of this was our main character telling fairy tales to some kids she was babysitting and working where she was in her romantic life into these fairy tales. These scenes not only felt bizarre and incredibly stupid, but they were also simply painful to watch. 

The best part of this film was the subplot about one of the main characters' sister. This is the only part of the story that I really cared about. Unfortunately it had little screen time and the ending of this subplot felt very rushed. 

The main character being a documentary filmmaker making a film about arranged marriages made me wish I was watching such a documentary rather than this poor excuse for a romantic comedy.