Summary
Squared Love All Over Again is an amateurish effort. For its sweetness, the movie’s down-to-earth style comes across as overly sentimental and disingenuous.
Directed by Filip Zylber, we review the 2023 Netflix film Squared Love All Over Again, which does not contain spoilers.
If you make a romantic comedy, you might as well do it right. Or at least, with a bit of flair. The Polish language Netflix rom-com Squared Love All Over Again is an amateurish effort that looks ripped from USA Network’s fall schedule. For its sweetness, the movie’s down-to-earth style comes across as saccharine and disingenuous, like most politicians.
Squared Love All Over Again Review and Plot Summary
Squared Love All Over Again follows the return story of Monika (Adrianna Chlebicka) and Enzo (Mateusz Banasiuk). They return from their vacation, and now Monika is a fashion icon. She graces covers across the country. You can find her in every magazine and story where cash, credit card, and maybe even bitcoin are accepted.
Enzo feels the tide turning regarding his celebrity reporter/billboard model. Like every man who dated Jennifer Aniston before Brad Pitt, Enzo doesn’t handle it well. He is no longer Jacek’s (Krzysztof Czeczot) favorite client. Monika now owns that title.
Not that she wants it. All Monika seeks to do is teach her class, though her presence is becoming an issue. All the parents want her to teach their kids because she is now a celebrity, and the school principal thinks she is a distraction (but not really, more on that later).
To promote her newfound fame, she is invited to a national talk show that likes to expose people to their worst sins. The host is Rafal (Mikolaj Roznerski), and he’s a real piece of work that Monika stands up to beautifully. So much so that his boss wants to pull him from a new kid’s show (think America’s Got Talent) unless he can convince Monika to host the program with him.
As we indicated above, Squared Love All Over Again is the sequel to 2021’s Squared Love, the surprise streaming hit. Director Filip Zylber’s follow-up is just as stupid and uninspired as the first. For one, the script is head scratchingly all over the place with characters, like the principal, changing behaviors and personalities quicker than in All About Eve. The interactions between Enzo and Monika are forced, and they have little chemistry. He can’t fathom why she is working so late and hard even though now he is broke and doesn’t have a job.
The plot involving Rafal desperately wanting a kid’s show, as if the executive was putting a man on such a program, would be disastrous in the first place. Then the show’s premise is insulting to the viewer. Creating a judge that is so callous he makes fun of children to their faces, but Monika is the only one there to stand up to them. The network must not have focus groups because, besides hurting a dog in a script, the cardinal rule is not to make children cry for entertainment by telling them mean things about themselves.
Is Squared Love All Over Again good?
Squared Love All Over Again doesn’t respect the audience. A case in point is the forced potential romance between Monika and Rafal should be the film’s secret weapon, even if we know where it is headed. The plot point and reveal are abandoned too early, and the payoffs later are as heartwarming as heating a tv-dinner.
What did you think of the 2023 Netflix film Squared Love All Over Again? Comment below.
