With its prevailing sentiments on dating in the digital age feeling more than a decade old, and themes centered on honesty and shallowness ringing hollow, this feature is fairly forgettable.
It’s a Hallmark Channel holiday movie on a Netflix budget. The characters are bland, the performances not much better and the writing almost instantly awful — tin-eared, clumsy ESL grammar and usage, the works.
Like most of Netflix’s seasonal assembly line of yuletide fare, “Love Hard” is both too well-cast for the Hallmark Channel and too half-assed for movie theaters. It’s likewise adrift between rom-com nostalgia, reckoning with the anxieties of dating in the digital age, and simply hitting enough data points to give the algorithm what it wants for Christmas.
25
RogerEbert.comMonica Castillo
RogerEbert.comMonica Castillo
Some moments are sweeter than others, but overall, this cookie cutter rom-com has nothing more or less than what its subgenre demands.