Movie reviews: Hollywood and Indie, specializing in independent comedies, dramas, thrillers and romance.
Friday, July 15, 2022
Love Accidentally: Movie Review
A lazy rom-com.
The world doesn’t need another streaming service, but like the name suggests, Freevee is a free, ad-supported platform under the Amazon banner (and the ads are very minimal). The world also doesn’t need more low-quality romantic comedies, and yet here we are, with Love Accidentally a Freevee Original. Love anonymously as done in You’ve Got Mail but now in text form.
2022
Directed by: Pete Sullivan
Screenplay by: Robert Dean Klein
Starring: Brenda Song, Aaron O'Connell
Alexa (Brenda Song) and Jason (Aaron O’Connell) are work enemies, literally being pitted against each other for the chance at a big promotion. I desperately need rom-coms to step outside the corporate world especially when the writers have never stepped foot in an office ever. It’s hard to say which is worse: Denise Richards’ acting as the boss of Alexa and Jason, or the non-descript dialogue about vague presentations, big clients and needing that account, or the actual office for a marketing company (remember in make believe rom-com world people only work for marketing companies) which has spacious hallways more offices than people and multiple breakrooms.
After Alexa and Jason are both dumped on the same day and Alexa loses her phone, she accidentally sends a broken heart text meant for her best friend to a stranger instead, who of course is Jason. And instead of ending the conversation with “sorry wrong number” they keep chatting but choose to not share their names. That’s fine, it’s cute, it’s supposed to be romantic. But they also choose to forgo revealing their ages. That one seems a lot more problematic to me.
Quality-wise, the plot is straight out of any Hallmark romance or anything even lower than that, it’s painfully predictable, the dialogue is bad (but the two main leads Song and O’Connell do their best with it), and it’s hard to even call this a rom-com since the comedy is nowhere to be found.
Character-wise, it’s a bit all over the place. Alexa and Jason’s competitiveness in the office is extremely tiring, but the film does well with only a slight change between Alexa’s office personality and her at-home on the phone with Jason personality, and her ex-boyfriend Perry is exactly who we would expect somebody like her to be with. Jason has a big shift between his office personality and his at-home personality. I first chalked this up to lazy unrealistic writing, but on second thought, men do like playing up being an asshole especially with other people around, but it’s still lazy writing.
The bulk of the movie is the two falling in love as they anonymously get to know each other. It is cute and sweet enough, but also very bland. Their personalities start shining a bit more when they start clueing in to who is on the opposite end of the texts.
Love Accidentally is mostly lazy filmmaking. More thought is put into how their feelings are going to grow and evolve, but it’s also a very tired plot with poor writing and bad editing. It’s a very choppy film with a run-time of 85 minutes that feels much longer.