Movie reviews: Hollywood and Indie, specializing in independent comedies, dramas, thrillers and romance.
Friday, November 15, 2024
Hello, Love, Again: Movie Review
The magic is gone and is replaced with a mess of forced comedy, dark drama and soap opera romance.
Hello, Love, Again has a good idea for the sequel, revisit the same characters in a new city. When Joy leaves Hong Kong for Canada, she’s starting a new life, but with the same love, so romantic issues are sure to abound. I was thinking something like Past Lives, but one where we already knew the characters. Instead the writers took every single idea they had for the sequel and packed all of them in. The result is a movie about everything that says nothing.
2024
Directed by: Cathy Garcia-Sampana
Screenplay by: Carmi Raymundo, Crystal S. San Miguel, Olivia M. Lamasan
Starring: Kathryn Bernardo, Alden Richards
Let’s start with the first problem. When Joy meets Ethan at the Calgary airport at the beginning of the movie, this is not the first time they’re meeting at an airport in Canada. In fact they have lived an entire life together and apart and together and apart in the five years since they first left each other. So much of the movie is told in flashback that it kind of seems pointless. But the movie needs all those flashbacks because it’d be impossible to piece the current movie together without them. This is when the writers should have realized that they need two sequels.
Now let’s talk about the tone. The first movie was able to maintain a nice and even light romantic dramedy throughout the entire movie; it never went overly comedic and it never went overly dark even when it got serious. It seemed effortless, maybe it was luck. For the sequel, the tone, like the plot, is all over the place. There is some really bad forced comedy with most of the supporting characters that is completely out of place, then it gets bizarrely dark at times, and then finally the romance scenes seem to take place in a telenovela and filmed in a completely different light and texture as if they belong in a different movie. Again, they do belong in a different movie, there should have been two sequels.
The main theme of the movie is how hard it is to emigrate. In Hong Kong, all Joy could think about was the new opportunities awaiting her in Canada, how much easier it will be to get a job as a nurse, how much easier it will be to earn more money. Here she is five years later, and it’s still a grind. She’s still not a fully qualified nurse, she’s still working multiple jobs to make ends meet. But the difference is, she’s still optimistic that this is the place for her. We also see the other side of the coin and the immigrants who can’t tough it out. This part of the movie is handled so fairly. The difficulties and challenges of a new life and especially in Canada, but how they do tend to find each other and help each other out.
However this movie is supposed to be a romance between Joy and Ethan. The movie likes playing up that Joy is a different person now, she goes by Marie, but the problem is that Ethan isn’t even a person anymore. A significant part of the first movie is that Joy completely changes Ethan into a different person, and now he hardly even exists outside of Joy; he is just a shell of a movie character.
Hello, Love, Again is all over the place in terms of plot, editing, tone and characters. It’s a mess of a movie that has its heart in the right place but is not able to recapture of the magic of the original.
