Summary
A rare R-rating tries to add some life to an age-old rom-com template, but despite game efforts from Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein, Office Romance never quite rises above the formula.
Maybe it’s my familiarity with him playing bumbling sad-sack figures in stuff like Ted Lasso and Shrinking, but I must confess to never having imagined Brett Goldstein with Jennifer Lopez. This is kind of a problem when it comes to their Netflix rom-com Office Romance, which hinges on an ill-advised workplace tryst between the two. Since it was co-written by Goldstein himself, you can sort of see how this came about, but that doesn’t mean it works. Despite its fair share of charm and smattering of pretty good gags, I never bought into the central conceit, and thus not the movie overall, either.
Netflix becoming J-Lo’s home-away-from-home remains a good thing, though, since she has to show off somewhere, but she’s not quite relevant enough anymore to be a proper draw in mainstream theatrical efforts. On streaming, though, she’s a big enough deal for stuff like The Mother and Atlas to exist, and she still shines with star quality in a role like this, which largely requires very Jennifer Lopez-esque characteristics.
But J-Lo isn’t really the hook of Office Romance. Instead, the appeal is an R-rating, implying this is the rare rom-com that’ll push some boundaries, sex and language-wise. This ends up being a false promise, though, since outside of a few tonally mismatched scenes of performative extremity – reminiscent of Prime Video’s Balls Up, rather worryingly – it’s mostly just any old romantic comedy, adhering slavishly to the usual routine.
Lopez plays Jackie, the CEO of an airline with a strict no-fraternization policy. This doesn’t seem to affect her life one jot, though, since she’s a die-hard careerist who spends all of her time trying to escape nepotism accusations by working herself half to death. A lawsuit alleging she smoothed through a business deal by sleeping with an executive should be open-and-shut, but her go-to legal guy (Bradley Whitford, Death by Lightning) chokes on a breakfast burrito, so new lawyer Daniel (Goldstein) has to take over.
Daniel is British, which we’re never allowed to forget about for a single second, since he’s less a character and more a walking assembly of Blighty cliches. Goldstein sells it really well, and his awkward bumbling is often very funny, but it really chafes against J-Lo’s glossy movie-star charisma. They’re mismatched, and not just in terms of their attractiveness, which makes their entire whirlwind romance difficult to buy into. The difficulty in justifying why Jackie would be into Daniel is made even more challenging by the fact that during their first meeting, a soft handshake gives Daniel a visibly stonking boner for no reason at all beyond needing to flex that R-rating (see also several passionate defences of the British affinity for the C-word, and an absolutely out-of-nowhere full-frontal birth scene).
Outside of those one or two moments where the raunch threatens to become overpowering, Office Romance really is business as usual, rom-com-wise. You can predict everything that’s going to happen from about five minutes in, and even the odd element that seems like a welcome curveball, such as Daniel’s sister, Lizzy (Jodie Whittaker, Toxic Town), being in prison for quite a serious crime, doesn’t end up going anywhere. Couple that with the R-rated theatrics and you end up with a bunch of obligatory Big Moments™ that feel distractingly silly even by genre standards. It would have been much better served cutting out the insincere naughtiness entirely and just playing the whole thing straight for a wider audience.
I should mention Betty Gilpin (Widow’s Bay, American Primeval), who plays one of Jackie’s employees and threatens to walk off with the entire movie every time she’s on-screen. She dials her performance up to a ridiculous degree to make the most of the flat material, and she has by far the best lines (my favourite, on the gap in attractiveness between Jackie and Daniel: “It’s like Helen of Troy having sex with Mr. Bean.”) Her performance alone is reason enough to check this out, but the flipside is that it might be the only reason.
