This was a decent romance film. Certainly not an Oscar winner, but for a Hallmark-esque romance, it was good. The story was fairly cliche. Long-term friends who should really connect romantically, except that one of them is already in a relationship and the other is too wimpy to share their real feelings. That's pretty much the whole storyline, and you know from the first 15 minutes of the movie how it's going to end up. But even though the plot is stretched pretty thin, I thought the two leads had good chemistry with each other. Haley Webb and Callard Harris dialed in decent performances. I'd never seen either of them in anything, but they did fine. The character of Rich, the unsuitable boyfriend, was sufficiently controlling so that you disliked him. These characters gave us just what we would expect from a romance about a love triangle.
The script was a little weak in spots. It's hard to put your finger on any one big item, but there were definitely some rough spots that needed polishing. One glaring loose end that I wish they had tied up was the whole issue with Claire's house. She broke up with her boyfriend Rich because she didn't want to sell her house in the suburbs and move in with him in the city. Yet, in the end, she and Henry get into a relationship, and he lives on the other side of the country, and has a business there. So, does he give up his whole life and business in New York and move to California to be with Claire, or does Claire sell her precious house after all and move to New York to be with Henry? There wasn't a satisfactory (or any) resolution there. I also didn't like the final resolution, where Henry gives Claire his high school love letter, then recites it word-for-word. I think it would have been much better if she had found the discarded letter and read it herself and then confronted Henry about it. At that point, he could have admitted that he still felt the same, and it wouldn't have been quite so cringy.
So, in all, this was a decent romance, and an adequate way to spend an hour or two. It gave us what we expect from such a movie, but we probably won't remember it a year from now.
The script was a little weak in spots. It's hard to put your finger on any one big item, but there were definitely some rough spots that needed polishing. One glaring loose end that I wish they had tied up was the whole issue with Claire's house. She broke up with her boyfriend Rich because she didn't want to sell her house in the suburbs and move in with him in the city. Yet, in the end, she and Henry get into a relationship, and he lives on the other side of the country, and has a business there. So, does he give up his whole life and business in New York and move to California to be with Claire, or does Claire sell her precious house after all and move to New York to be with Henry? There wasn't a satisfactory (or any) resolution there. I also didn't like the final resolution, where Henry gives Claire his high school love letter, then recites it word-for-word. I think it would have been much better if she had found the discarded letter and read it herself and then confronted Henry about it. At that point, he could have admitted that he still felt the same, and it wouldn't have been quite so cringy.
So, in all, this was a decent romance, and an adequate way to spend an hour or two. It gave us what we expect from such a movie, but we probably won't remember it a year from now.