WHAT LOVE LOOKS LIKE: Love & Other Ughs

Straight out of the gate, the genre of rom-com has a strike against it: the all-too-predictable happy ending. Who wants to snuggle up with a feel-good flick only to be bummed out by the third act, right? The rom-com holds a special place in the Hollywood landscape. They are easy to digest cinematic comfort food and delicious – if made correctly.

What Love Looks Like, written, directed, shot, and produced by Alex Magaña, tries hard to check all the boxes set forth by past rom-com attempts from the sickly sweet meet-cutes to the low stakes plot lines. But having all the common tropes does not always make for a successful narrative.

Too Much Sugar Is Bad For You

The idea of a romantic comedy being greater than the sum of its parts fails more often than not due to the formulaic style needed to achieve its goal. Boy meets girl. Witticisms are exchanged. Minor conflict ensues. A romantic gesture rights the ship. Love wins the day. This is not to say all movies following a blueprint don’t work. Moonstruck, 10 Things I Hate About You, Roman Holiday, to name a few, use the typical ideas of what goes into the genre as a helpful guide while still creating their own spin on story and character development. What Love Looks Like fails at these ideals with each passing second of the thankfully short 88-minute runtime.

Trying to ape from the later day Garry Marshall playbook of multi-storied plots about falling in love while intertwining characters cross paths in order to create a world. What Love Looks Like does nothing more than take five short films about different relationships and edits them together with no tangible throughline. None of the characters from the other plots interact or even know the other stories are happening which makes mashing the tales together completely meaningless. Instead, we are given random, sickly sweet stories with no actual congruence. To be honest, the only story with any teeth is about a couple who have a one night stand only to meet again on a blind date app. Albeit, trite in execution, that should have been the entire movie.

Words Hurt

Let’s talk about dialogue, or rather, the unconvincing way human interaction is portrayed in this film. A raging case of First Draft Syndrome rears its ugly head early on, asking the characters to spew flat jokes or over conversational bits of word salad in an attempt to sound like real people. Instead, the mind-numbing banter amounts to verbiage no one could ever convincingly say in conversation without sounding like they are reading from a script.

Contractions are thrown out the window while “Shucks” is used with all sincerity, solidifying the fact that I wasn’t going crazy. Nobody sounds genuine or cute. They just come off like first-time actors struggling to form a modicum of chemistry with their scene partner. Besides a few snickers from my sheer disbelief of what I was watching, the comedy plays as though a twelve-year-old tried to write what they think adults sound like.

Normally, I’m not keen on being this harsh on a film meant to be a warm fuzzy romp crafted to put a smile on your face, but nothing about the experience is sincere or, at least, entertaining. From one scene to the next, the filmmaker oversaturates the movie with hokey ‘Golly-Gee’ moments and disingenuously adorable encounters so grossly unrelatable it actually brings the film’s title into serious question. One should not come away from a movie steeped in the inclination of love only to feel the exact opposite of its intent.

I’m Just Not That Into You

What Love Looks Like brings very little to the table in terms of originality or likeability. You’ve seen it all before, done better, and in more captivating ways and with better acting. The writing is lazy, the characters are forgettable, the stories are a slog, and the humor is nonexistent. Racking my brain to find a positive take away from the diabetically cloying rom-com clone I witnessed, What Love Looks Like, I would like to think, comes from an optimistic place where love conquers all and finding unadulterated passion and bliss in another person’s being is celebrated as the beautiful gift we should all be so fortunate to chance upon. Yes. I would like to think that.

To bring this to a close on a more positive note, I will give credit where credit is due. The film looks fabulous with a bold pallet to match the candy-coated feel Magaña was more than likely going for. Also serving as the film’s cinematographer, he definitely has an eye for visuals and should be commended for his skill with a camera. Unfortunately, in the end, all of the bright colors, saccharine speak, and Hallmark Channel sentiment can’t give me back the 88-minutes I endured trying to find the elation I was purported to experience from watching What Love Looks Like.

Film Inquiry wants to know which rom-coms set your heart aflutter while tickling your funny bone. Let us know a few of your favorites in our comment section.

What Love Looks Like is available now on disc and streaming.