Review of Love Again, directed by James C. Strouse

I have a subscription to AMC Theaters, which is, if you’re not from the states, a national movie theater chain. Which means despite being a critic who watches movies from the comfort of my laptop, at home, a lot, I still drive twenty minutes to go to the theater.

It’s quite an experience to go to an actual theater and hear the reactions of the people around you. Granted, after COVID audiences suck, and some of my favorite crowds have just been press screenings with critics.

Anyways, I kept getting hit with the Love Again trailer every single time I went to AMC, which mean I pretty much had this one memorized by the time it had actually come out in the early summer of 2023. I thought I would drag myself to see it, but then ended up deciding that I didn’t feel like putting myself through this movie.

Fast forward to the fall. I’m attempting to procrastinate on graduate school work, I see Love Again is added onto Netflix, I pressed play. That’s how we got here today, friends.

Let’s get into the review.

After the tragic death of her boyfriend, an illustrator finds love with a guy who gets his old phone number—but she doesn’t know that at first.

This movie begins with the inciting incident that causes all of the later events to happen: Mira is at a coffeeshop with her boyfriend John. The two are deeply in love and while it seems like they’re soulmates, he leaves the coffee shop. She watches him go, and is then horrified to see him get hit by a car.

John doesn’t survive the incident, and Mira moves back home with her parents, where she paints sad art. Two years pass, and her sister, Suzy, tells her to get out of their parents’ house and come back tot he city, and Mira finally packs up her things and comes back.

The story pivots to the male lead, Rob, who works at a firm where his boss constantly yells at everyone because no one can seemingly do anything right in this workplace. He’s been dumped by his fiancee a week before the wedding, and he’s naturally pretty depressed about it and wants to cut her off of him.

While at work, his boss assigns him a piece on Celine Dion, and he gets a pretty stern warning that if he doesn’t do this well, his job is over.

Rob is given a new phone for the gig, and his fellow coworkers tell him he needs to get back out on the market. Suddenly, when Mira is nostalgic about her John, she decides to start texting his old number about she misses him and that life is so difficult without him there.

She’s getting told by her publisher that if she doesn’t get herself together and stop producing sad, depressing children’s books, then she is going to be let go along with the intern that works there.

As it turns out, Rob’s new number for the work phone is John’s former number, so all of Mira’s text messages are going to him. At first he (and his coworkers) are convinced this is a scam, but then when she texts him about a blind date she’s going on, he decides to go find her.

Of course the blind date is Nick Jonas, who acts like a typical finance guy with no thoughts in his head, and Mira decides she hates him before moving on. Celine Dion is then thrown into all of this, as she chastised Rob earlier in the movie, and suddenly she’s coaching him on passion and a love life.

Rob then decides to find Mira at an event she’s going to at the opera, so he walks up to her and introduces himself. He gives her his regular number, they go on dates, cue love.

The two actually get along really well and he even gets along with her sister, which is a miracle in Mira’s eyes. Celine notes the change in Rob as he falls more in love, but obviously Mira gets super pissed off when she finds out Rob hid from her that he was getting the text.

They separate, but the piece Rob writes is a hit, and his boss, while pretending to yell at him, tells him so. Rob decides to go out and find Mira, they reconcile, and then the film ends with a happily ever after.

Overall Thoughts

It’s just a super generic romance movie. I didn’t think the humor was funny at certain moments, as I wasn’t sure if the depressed caterpillar bit was supposed to be a joke. That was just sad, but the writing in this one could’ve been better.

Granted, someone else would like it a lot more than I did for sure, but I wanted her to overcome her grief in more natural ways, not by finding another man.

A non-romance version of this story is what I’m getting at here, but at the end of the day, I thought this was just vaguely mediocre.

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