You know, I’m perfectly fine with the way movies are release nowadays.

I know there are complaints that the only movies that get made are low-budget efforts that won’t hurt a studio if they fail or big budget blockbusters. People will lament that the mid-cost movie never gets made anymore. Where are the Adventure pictures? What happened to the studio Comedy? Where have all of the Romcoms gone? It’s all Horror and Superheroes now.

(“It’s All Horror and Superheroes Now” would actually be the title of a very short book about my two favorite genres, but that’s off topic and maybe I’m biased)

I personally find these complaints baseless. The small-to-mid budget movie still exists; it just doesn’t often have a huge theatrical release. As time has progressed, so have the viewing habits of the general public, and these films are finding their homes directly on streaming giants rather than in the cinema. Now, is that “fair”? Who am I to say? But I don’t think that streaming releases deserve the stigma that used to accompany direct-to-video efforts. Streaming is how a shocking percentage of the audience watches movies now.

I still love the theater experience, and I always will. I quite enjoy going to the movies, but some people don’t, and they prefer to watch their films at home. And that’s where Netflix steps in and says “Do you want a new Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy, but you don’t want to wait or go to the cinema to see it? We got you, fam, and it’s gonna be fire”.

(I assume Netflix would talk like that. I assume everyone cooler than I talks like that)

Enter: Office Romance. This is a picture that would 100% have had a theatrical window in the 1990’s or 2000’s. But we as a society have decided these kinds of movies don’t need those anymore, so instead, it was released straight to the king of the streamers. It stars the aforementioned Jenny From The Block, Brett Goldstein, Betty Gilpin, and more, and it tells the story of Lopez’ character (Jackie) and Goldstein’s (Daniel) falling for one another while working at an airline together.

Jackie is the under-fire CEO of AirCruz, and Daniel is the company’s #2 lawyer. When his superior (played by the lovable Bradley Whitford) gets taken out of the equation by a breakfast burrito, Daniel is forced to step up when Jackie gets sued over airport gates in Dallas.

It’s a romcom, so of course sparks fly between Jackie and Daniel after some rough early going between them. During a trip to the Caribbean to face another lawsuit, the two begin a relationship. But it’s one that they must keep secret due to the airline’s strict no-dating policy. As the rules of the workplace cause them irritation, so, too, do the pair’s cultural differences.

What are two hot rich people in love to do?!

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Betty Gilpin is the stand out of the cast, and she deserved an expanded role in a nearly two hour film. Not that she doesn’t have a strong presence, but I could direly have used more of her. Her character has a very pronounced take-no-shit attitude, and I appreciated her so much more than I did most of the other characters (Tony Hale excluded because he always rules but has little more than a cameo here). 

+ I won’t lie; I DID laugh a few times, none moreso than a late joke during a press conference that Jackie is giving that actually elicited a decent belly laugh. We’re going to talk more about this film’s attempts at humor in a second here, but on occasion, it did land pretty well. 

– The movie is very try-hard throughout, but ESPECIALLY in the first act or so, where it’s going out of its way to be bawdy and shockrageous. It’s just attempting to blow the average romcom viewer’s mind with how overtly dirty it thinks it is being. It’s neither that exceptional nor that funny, and honestly, I almost turned it off in the first half-hour due to the “cringe” factor. That said, it does have an extremely high level of shock value later on when we see the most graphic portrayal of childbirth I’ve ever seen in a movie. So credit to that. I guess? 

– Office Romance introduces the obligatory conflict in the beginning of the third act, and it all feels so forced. Nothing about the tension between Jackie and Daniel comes across as natural or progressive for where they were in their relationship, and it all so much more seems like some stuff a screenwriter crowbar’ed in to keep a film going. Daniel and Jackie’s characterizations turn on their heads, and everything goes to pot just because the runtime needed it to.

-What’s this?! A THIRD down? Well, it’s a very small one I couldn’t let go of: early in the film, a bunch of characters are standing in front of a TV, and the TV shows a weather report with two hurricanes approaching the Caribbean. Later on, our protagonists fly to the Dominican Republic, and I said aloud “I will give this movie a whole extra star if the hurricanes on the background TV report pay off here!”. Well, they don’t. So I didn’t. So close, Office Romance. So close. 

OVERALL

Office Romance is a very uneven, up-and-down motion picture that has its fair share of dry spells, but also a few laughs, too. And the chemistry between J Lo and Goldstein is certainly there, and that’s a must for any romcom. So while it falls short of being something I would recommend, it’s not the worst thing you could choose to watch, either.