‘Love at First Sight’ review: Netflix rom-com is basic but buoyant
“Love at First Sight” is billed as a romantic comedy.
It’s rarely funny.
Plus, the adaptation of Jennifer E. Smith’s 2011 novel, “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight,” debuting on Netflix this week comes with a bit of window dressing that ranges from useless but harmless to vaguely annoying.
Know what? None of that really matters.
“Love at First Sight” accomplishes its most important job: Presenting us with two likable lead characters and making us care about them ultimately ending up together — even if we know there’s, like, a 99.9 percent probability that they will.
As you may have gathered from the novel’s title, the story is very interested in how likely something is to happen based on data and in statistics in general.
We are told at the onset, for example, that Dec. 20 is the worst day to fly through New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport due to a number of holiday-related facts and figures. That is exactly what the pleasant couple-to-be — Hadley (Haley Lu Richardson) and Oliver (Ben Hardy) — are facing.
She is flying to London for the wedding of her father (Rob Delaney of “Catastrophe”), not all that long split from her mother, to a woman she has never met. (We get the feeling the three haven’t even Zoomed, which seems, statistically speaking, unlikely.)
He is returning home to London for a far different type of event, but after Hadley and Oliver meet — after he offers her a charger for her nearly zapped phone — and go for food, she believes he also will be attending nuptials.
They have their differences — she is somewhat regularly tardy while he rarely is, for instance — but hit it off right away.
He detests surprises, with good reason, believing they can be all but eliminated via predictive data, so he is studying statistics at Yale, he tells her.
“Wow,” she says, “subtle status drop there.”
“British, you know,” he counters. “I can’t help myself.”
Because she was, yes, late for her flight, she ends up on his, the two ultimately getting to spend the several-hour jaunt together cozying up comfortably in business class.
As we are told early on, they will become separated upon landing across the pond, and as we suspect, each will work to find his or her way back to the other.
We are given this knowledge, along with a parade of stats, by a narrator (Jameela Jamil of “The Good Place” and “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law”) who is never far from the action. In fact, she appears as an attendant on the flight, a customs agent, a bartender at the wedding reception, etc.) Perhaps this device is a nod by writer Katie Lovejoy or director Vanessa Caswill to literature — the writings of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens add more window dressing to this tale — but it tends to be more irritating than charming.
Fortunately, we get all the charm we need from time spent with Hadley and Oliver, mainly together but even aprt, thanks primarily to Richardson (“The White Lotus,” “Unpregnant”) and Hardy (“The Voyeurs,” “Bohemian Rhapsody”).
You can’t help but wish there were a bit more to this story, a complication or two beyond what Lovejoy (“To All the Boys: Always and Forever”) and Caswill (2016 miniseries “Thirteen”) offer, but the latter keeps the plane humming along at a good clip, so we forgive that, too.
With apologies to the hook of the movie, we don’t have its exact number of cute moments, which include a fun daddy-daughter dance, but there are several.
It adds up, if only by so much, to a flight worth taking.
‘Love at First Sight’
Where: Netflix.
When: Sept. 15.
Rated: PG-13 for brief strong language and some suggestive references.
Runtime: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
Stars (of four): 2.5.