Summary
People We Meet on Vacation has likeable enough leads and a premise that could work under the right circumstances, but an overlong runtime and plodding structure make it laborious.
From top to bottom, People We Meet on Vacation is a streaming movie. It has been produced as part of Netflix’s Sony deal, but it really could have landed anywhere, such is the algorithmically precise nature of its pop novel source material, beautiful leads, glossy presentation, and smartly timed New Year release window. When everyone is thinking about reinventing themselves, a movie about two people struggling to figure out what they want in life is likely to go down a treat.
Not this movie, though. For one thing, it runs for two hours, which is much too long. Given that you can predict the ending five minutes into the runtime, things quickly start to feel laboured, and a repetitive flashback structure doesn’t help. But the nakedness with which it’s designed to appeal as broadly and safely as possible is the most pernicious issue. Any potential edges have been planed away. It’s funny but not daringly so, intermittently sexy but not enough to test the boundaries of its PG-13 rating, it stars a cavalcade of young, hot streaming stars, and it expects the audience’s comfortable expectations and a few choice needle drops to do a lot of heavy lifting.
The annoying thing is that it could have been so much better. Emily Henry’s source material is beloved, and while it isn’t my cup of tea at the best of times, it’s easy to see how the When Harry Met Sally friends-to-lovers trope works nicely enough, draped over the flashback structure of multiple recalled vacations. But even how People We Meet on Vacation handles the passage of time feels oddly fake, with very little to differentiate each section. Each only occurs a year apart, to be fair, but they nonetheless all blur together after a while.
I should explain, since the premise is pretty key. Our Harry and Sally stand-ins are Alex (Tom Blythe, Billy the Kid) and Poppy (Emily Bader), who meet while taking a road trip home from college and, despite their chalk and cheese personalities, enjoy it so much they agree to meet every summer, no matter what they’re doing in their respective lives. In the present day, Poppy is working as a travel writer for a very nebulous company owned by Swapna (Jameela Jamil, A Merry Little Ex-Mas), and essentially living life as a string of all-expenses-paid vacations. When she’s invited to Alex’s brother’s wedding in Barcelona, she has to weigh up seeing Alex again, from whom she has become estranged, and each flashback to their trips – to the Canadian wilderness, to New Orleans, to a Tuscan villa on an ill-advised couples’ retreat – fleshes out more of how their relationship developed and ultimately fell apart.
See? Nothing wrong with that. But the concept is hamstrung by a few things. One is that Blyth and Bader have such immediate and obvious chemistry that the ultimate arc of the movie is never really in question. This is admittedly common in rom-coms and often part of the sales pitch, but People We Meet on Vacation is trying to build too much mystery for the inevitability to really work. Roadblocks along the way – mostly in the form of significant others – feel contrived as a result, too. It would have been fine to highlight how Alex and Poppy’s relationships never work because they’re ultimately in love with each other, but they also tend to date people – played by Spencer Neville (Ozark) and Lucien Laviscount (Emily in Paris) in Poppy’s case and Sarah Catherine Hook (The White Lotus) in Alex’s – who are generally unpleasant and unreasonable.
It just feels so contrived. Each trip lacks specificity to such an extent that the visual of a four-foot aboriginal totem that Poppy buys on a whim and Alex has to carry around is returned to multiple times to communicate the same point, since there was nothing else of real significance that happened on any of the vacations that couldn’t have happened somewhere else. For comedy and drama, the movie relies on the played-out opposites-attract dynamic, with Alex’s buttoned-up, by-the-book attitude and humble desires of small-town stability rubbing up against Poppy’s weird idiosyncrasies and impossible-to-sate wanderlust. In short: She’s itinerant, he’s itinerary.
But as much as this can work, it doesn’t here because of everything described above. The complete lack of intrigue and jeopardy makes the movie feel laborious, and writers Amos Vernon, Nunzio Randazzo, and romance author Yulin Kuang can’t find a way to create the necessary drama that doesn’t feel wholly unconvincing. At two hours, each attempt feels like a frustrating stopgap on the way to an entirely predictable climax. It’s a trip that just doesn’t seem worth the jetlag.
