This review may contain spoilers.
Utter garbage. This poorly done take on When Harry Met Sally doesn’t attempt to cover anything new, or share new insights into the genre or humanity. It’s just a thoughtless retread, with poor pacing and poor execution.
The story ends up feeling like a reductive Hallmark movie in reverse, where the guy loves his small town home in Ohio more than the girl does, and he can’t possibly commit until she can agree that she needs to make compromises. All of that just to drop it and move to New York with her anyway, all while she solipsistically voiceovers about how she found a home and doesn’t care where it is, so long as he’s there. The whole thing feels gross, and I think it’s because the film ends in a way that leaves Alex in complete control of her. It’s like the film accidentally says that women just need to find a man who can smooth off their rough edges, and I’m not convinced they’re not purposefully saying exactly that. It feels like a film lobbied and campaigned for by a Men’s Rights group.
This is all bad enough, but it’s terribly paced, and it felt like it was building up to its ending at least four times in the final thirty minutes. There are more endings here than in Return of the King. This film does not earn the payoffs it attempts.
What holds me back from believing any malice was actually attempted is the sheer incompetence on display. Many of the sets are overexposed, with poor lighting and poor colour choices. The colourists push most skin tones into a sort of sickly yellow, and most of the mid tones live there too. Crushed shadows are everywhere, often in the same shot as overexposed streetlights. The film is over saturated and filled with ProMyst filters, which I suppose the filmmakers believe amplifies the surrealism of the whole “travel for a living” job. But the moment the two of them finally get together, the colours are stripped away, and we’re left with an image that looks almost ungraded. I think they’re trying to suggest that they have finally found something real, instead of the fantasy, but the effect is done for such a brief period of time that it feels like the sex must have just sucked. This is all utterly thoughtless filmmaking, inconsistent and without a cohesive approach from shot to shot and scene to scene. It’s offensive to the form to try this little and make something this banal.
The net effect of all this incompetence is that it looks like a Blu-ray mastered in 2010, or a cheap TV show made for cable, which is not a compliment. The camera work is as inspired as an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.
It’s not that this is the worst film I’ve ever seen. What angers me is that this level of incompetence is now acceptable at a studio level. The same studio that wants to push this technical drudgery on us is the same one who wants to buy Warner Bros, and if this level of thoughtless “craftsmanship” passes for art, I’m going to entirely lose interest in the medium. There are YouTubers who are doing more interesting visual work than this. Before somebody tells me that cinema isn’t all about the cinematography, I need to remind you you’re staring at a freaking picture box for 2+ hours when you watch a movie. The whole point is the moving picture. If you suck at making sensible pictures, you have no business making me sit through two hours of your commercial misery.