CAST: Priyanka Chopra, Sam Heughan, Celine Dion
DIRECTOR: James C. Strouse
Ten minutes into Love Again, we wondered if they really used a bad chatGPT prompt to write the script of this terrible movie.
However, this movie actually draws its inspiration from the German film SMS für Dich (Text for You), which in turn was based on a 2009 novel of the same name by Sofie Cramer.
The plot revolves around the efforts of a children’s book author, Mira Ray (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), to move on with her life after a drunk driver kills her boyfriend. The depiction of this tragedy in the opening scene is the first sign that Love Again will be a special kind of bad movie: Strause cuts to a long, unintentionally hilarious close-up of Chopra scrunching her face in confusion at the shrill, offscreen screech of tires.
Cut to two years later, and Mira still grieves the dream man she lost. To cope, she begins sending text messages to her dead beau’s cell phone—expressing her broken heart via floridly anguished one-sided conversations that Strause scrolls down the right side of the screen.
However, these love-laden texts aren’t just disappearing into Verizon servers. They’re popping up on the new work phone of journalist Rob Burns (Outlander‘s Sam Heughan), who swiftly falls in love with the unknown sender, waxing despondently poetic from afar. (Perhaps distrusting that audiences will accept the concept of a telephone number being reassigned, Love Again has the lights flicker in both characters’ NYC apartments, implying a cosmic matchmaking scheme.)
Determined to meet the deep soul, unwittingly text bombing him, Rob ends up carefully stalking Mira, spying on her first date at a bar (Chopra’s actual Mr. Right plays the Mr. Wrong, Nick Jonas, whose lack of chemistry with his real-life wife is hopefully intentional) and manufacturing a meet-cute at the opera. Rob’s energy is at once awkward and weirdly intense—a uniquely unappealing combo.
The leads have no romantic spark, and their “wit” is drab and inconspicuous. The movie has too many side characters like a cookie-cut Friends set. Celine Dion plays herself in an extended cameo.
She becomes a kind of fairy-godmother figure, using her own lyrics to encourage Rob to step up his creepy pursuit of a total stranger. It’s a truly bizarre, self-aggrandizing, disgusting performance where you wonder why you want to watch the movie.
Why did we spend an afternoon getting tortured in theaters to watch this painful story of two people who look less in love than two British royals?
No clue.
Watch it, if you absolutely must, in theaters near you.
