I desperately wanted to like this movie. I love the main actress, Rebecca Dalton, but even she couldn't save the character she was playing. Her character as written was one of the least likeable female rom-com personalities I've ever seen...and I've seen a LOT of rom-coms.
At base, she's a control freak. Now this in itself isn't a horrible problem, it's been done enough in rom-coms that it could even be considered a trope: "Control freak learns to loosen up and relax". The problem is...she never changes. When you start with an unlikeable character you need character growth in order to show they've changed into someone likeable. There simply isn't any character growth to be found in this movie. Even in the last scene, she's STILL manipulating the male lead and forcing him to do things he's uncomfortable with and doesn't want to do.
This is compounded by the fact that she's not "oh it's a cute over the top rom-com" kind of controlling. She's honestly kinda creepy manipulative "no one in their right mind would put up with this insanity" kinda controlling. I don't want to have to spoiler tag this review so I won't go into specifics, but a central theme of the interactions between the two leads is being better at communicating. While the blame/ownership of the bad communication is placed entirely on the male lead, good grief was that not the case at all. Her character could teach a master class on gaslighting...
5.5 stars would be exactly average. This is definitely below average, so I went with 4 stars. It's a 3-star movie, but I bumped it up 1 because of the lead actress. She played the character as it was written well...but that was the problem.
