Love Again is a super generic rom-com which fails at just about everything the genre needs to work.
The flick stars Priyanka Chopra (Jonas) and some inanimate carbon rod as a couple of people unlucky in love. His girlfriend (off-screen) left him right before the wedding and her boyfriend got killed (off-screen) by a drunk driver. Now she’s dealing with her loss by texting messages to his old cell number… which he gets on his new work phone. Will he, you know, do what a normal person would do and delete the messages OR text back “who dis?” Of course not… he’ll hunt her down and have a meet cute, setting up a typical standard-issue rom-com ticking clock third act breakup <insert eye rolls here>.
The inanimate carbon rod can’t keep his accent straight and, as far as this guy can tell, has no charisma and certainly no chemistry with Chopra. And while Chopra is some kind of lovely, she can’t save this hackneyed script. Both characters are boring individually and generate no spark when together.
It takes about forty-five minutes for these two to even meet so hope you like to count ceiling tiles in the mean time. Hell, the inanimate carbon rod has more scenes with Celine Dion (playing herself) than he does Chopra in the first half of the movie. Hard to generate romantic chemistry if you keep your lovers not only apart, but largely unaware of each other’s existence.
The biggest problem is the cookie-cutter ticking clock “you lied to me!” reveal. It’s such a stupid scenario that could have been solved on their first meeting. But of course it wasn’t… how else is this rom-com going to conform to the laws of rom-coms and be exactly like every rom-com that ever rom-commed onto a rom-com audience?
Sigh. This is where I admit it’s not the worst movie I’ve seen. It’s a bad one but at least Chopra is lovely and… ummm… it wasn’t as boring as it could have been? And it was competently shot and edited.
Prianka Chopra deserves better… and maybe so too does the inanimate carbon rod (who is played by.. google don’t fail me now… Sam Heughan). But this is what we got and this is me signing off after writing more words than this flick deserves.
Score: 67