‘Love at First Sight’ Movie Review: Airplane Romance Might Even Charm Cynics
Photo from Netflix
From Jeremy Kibler
Like a next-generation Serendipity, Love at First Sight is as winsome, dreamy, and non-cynical as movies get. Based on the book “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight” by Jennifer E. Smith, the film starts off aggressively cutesy—“This is not a story about love…it is a story about fate…and statistics,” says the narrator—but director Vanessa Caswill and writer Katie Lovejoy resist allowing their airplane romance to get too twee and cloying for its own good. It also helps when your two leads are the adorable Haley Lu Richardson and the very cute Ben Hardy. One would have to be in a pissy mood to not be charmed hook, line, and sinker.
20-year-old American girl Hadley (Richardson) misses her flight by four minutes from New York to London for a wedding. Her father (Rob Delaney) is marrying a woman Hadley hasn’t met yet. Luckily, she has a meet-cute with 22-year-old Oliver (Hardy), a statistic-obsessed Brit. Once they both get on another flight and end up sitting right next to each other in first class, their lives will change over those six hours. If you’re a hater of love—or you already know you’ll roll your eyes at the line, “Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?”—there’s the door.
Sure, if it wasn’t for a phone battery, our leads would be getting together must faster. 1 + 1 does equal 2, so, yes, they will have their happy-ever-after by the end (that isn’t a spoiler). Hadley and Oliver could have easily just remained collections of quirks standing in for actual characters, but these two actually feel like real people with actual thoughts in their heads. Rob Delaney is well-suited to the earnest dad role, and the fact that he and Hadley have silly dance choreography to “Video Killed the Radio Star” at the wedding reception is the sweetest thing. Without getting into details, a Shakespeare-themed memorial is bittersweet and extremely life-affirming, and there, Oliver’s parents are played by the wonderful Sally Phillips and Dexter Fletcher.
Pop songs, particularly in romantic comedies, can often be a crutch for telling us how to feel, unless they are perfectly chosen. A slowed-down acoustic cover of “I Wanna (Dance With Somebody)” has an odd placement, but it works, and Angelo De Augustine’s “Time” and Bear Den’s “Above the Clouds of Pompeii” are just beautifully woven into what’s happening on screen. Jameela Jamil (She-Hulk: Attorney at Law) also gets to be the cheeky narrator, a ubiquitous “Greek chorus” telling us Hadley and Oliver’s ages, heights, and top three fears and then guiding their story along in different disguises.
Maybe Love at First Sight just hit on the right day when it was needed most. For a story about fate, one just has to buy into every plot contrivance and go with the illusion. Even so, there’s no denying that Hadley and Oliver are charming together and meant for each other, and not just because they both hate mayonnaise.
Rating: 4/5
Love at First Sight is currently streaming on Netflix.
