Summary
A lack of chemistry tanks this office rivals-to-lovers romantic comedy from Amazon Prime FreeVee. Even Brenda Song can’t save this poorly made and poorly written film.
This review of the Amazon Prime FreeVee film Love Accidentally does not contain spoilers.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that a romantic comedy made by Amazon Prime FreeVee is lacking in quality. Peter Sullivan’s Love Accidentally (2022), will give you a new appreciation for the quality of Netflix’s recent rom-coms. The screenplay by Robert Dean Klein follows a traditional office rivals-to-lovers story but fails to ever excite the audience.
Alexa (Brenda Song) is a determined and serious advertising sales rep who wants nothing more than to climb the ranks at the agency at which she works. But her boss isn’t content to simply hand her a promotion. Instead, Debra (Denise Richards) puts together a competition between her and her co-worker Jason (Aaron O’Connell) for who will get the promotion to Director of Sales. Whoever convinces wine-maker Craig (Maxwell Caulfield) to sign with them wins. Jason is a cocky newcomer and Alexa resents that he’s being considered for the same position, considering how many years she has worked there.
Meanwhile, her boyfriend Perry (Gib Gerard) breaks up with Alexa on the recommendation of his life coach. She drafts a lengthy text to her best friend and coworker Hannah (Brooke Newton) complaining about her heartbreak but sends it to the wrong number as she’s recently gotten a new phone. Unbeknownst to her, Jason is the recipient of the text and he has also recently been broken up with. The two begin an anonymous friendship over text and bond, despite continually trying to outdo each other professionally.
This premise, while overly invested in romance tropes, could work if the leads had the chemistry to pull it off. But unfortunately, Song and O’Connell simply don’t have it and it’s almost hard to believe that Song could deliver a performance this unengaging. There’s little to no character development for most of the characters, about whom we are told very little. Even their spaces tell us nothing about them with the production design looking as generic as possible. The costume design is confusingly bad and the editing is clunky and outdated. It has less visual flair than a Hallmark film.
Aside from all this, most of the supposed romantic connection happens between the lead couple over text. This has been done well in films before, but Love Accidentally switches between showing the texts on their phones, having them pop up onscreen, and having the characters use voice-to-text. And who on earth uses voice-to-text just to say “Hey”?
Love Accidentally definitely hopes to play off of the Shop Around the Corner and You’ve Got Mail concept, but it fails to provide any sparks in Alexa and Jason’s online correspondence. It also never attempts to tackle anything larger than the romance, when there was a perfect opportunity to provide commentary on women in the workplace and how they’re often passed over for less-qualified men. Unfortunately, this rom-com is pretty much what you would expect to get on a free platform.
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You can watch this film on Amazon Prime.
