A Tourist’s Guide to Love is a pretty average rom-com mixed with a Netflix Watcher’s Guide to Vietnamese Tourism. Yeah, just a fairly cute rom-com randomly set and shot in Vietnam. You want to pay a monthly Netflix rate for virtual tourism? Here ya go.

Rachel Leigh Cook (!!) plays a tourism executive who travels to Vietnam (after a breakup, naturally) to check out a local tour company that’s up for sale. She meets and falls for the hot Vietnamese guide… who expects to inherit the company but doesn’t know about the sale.

This is a pretty decent rom-com that adheres to the traits of the genre (including the secret and betrayal that must exist by law). Rachel Leigh Cook remains All That and the male romantic lead (Scott Ly) is charming and comes out of a river shirtless in the right kind of way.

The tourism part of the movie helps. It’s nice to see Vietnam and its culture presented respectfully and (I’m guessing) honestly. The film has the courtesy to only mention the American war in Vietnam exactly once… since that (as the movie points out) is not all there is to the country.

And kudos for a perfectly fine little rom-com that has some of the requirements checked but at least isn’t stupid and insipid. The leads are smart, flirty, and believable together and that’s often more than your typical rom-com delivers.

This is a perfectly alright movie. Fans of rom-coms should absolutely love it. Those who go in suffering their slings and arrows will have at least seem much worse.

Score: 75