Netflix, home of hits like “Love is Blind” and “Too Hot to Handle,” has fictionalized one of its major moneymakers with “The Wrong Paris,” directed by Janeen Damien. Dawn (Miranda Cosgrove) is a small-town waitress and metalsmithing sculptor who dreams of nothing more than escaping Texas and venturing to Paris, France, for art school. When she’s accepted without financial aid, her younger sister concocts the perfect scheme: audition for the major dating show “The Honey Pot,” which is filming its upcoming season in Paris.
Dawn, flippant to the fanciful appeal of reality dating at first shrugs off the idea, but after realizing that her “Paris Fund” falls severely short of coverage, she decides to entertain the plan: Get accepted to the show and then get eliminated in the first episode, using the $20,000 appearance fee to fund her education. After all, she’ll save on the airfare since the show is filming in Paris anyway, so she thinks.
It turns out that the producers’ major twist for the reality show is to pull a fast one on the contestants, testing their desire for love by not setting the show in the city of lights, but rather, Paris, Texas. Dawn finds herself only 60 miles from home, part of a cast of true hopefuls, including testy, competitive influencer Lexi (Madison Pettis, with a horrific accent) and sweet genius Jasmine (a warm Christin Park), whom she befriends. To complicate matters, the “honey” (the show’s equivalent of the Bachelor) is Trey (Pierson Fode), a hunky rancher whom Dawn already had a flirty night with just days prior. Stuck on the show, with increasingly complicated emotions pulling her left and right, Dawn stands at the crossroads between her life’s dream and her potential life’s love.
“The Wrong Paris” is corny and formulaic, down to the laziness of the “not-like-other-girls” characteristics that implore us to take an interest in Dawn in the first place. She doesn’t do Pilates; she has spurs on her boots instead of heels on her shoes; she works with tools and doesn’t care about boys; she can wrestle a belligerent drunk guy out of a bar. She’s so-called unique. Cosgrove is undoubtedly trying to broach the spectrum of emotion and spunk, but is unfortunately wooden. Fode pulls off his simplistic role, actually offering a healthy dose of spark, even when Cosgrove doesn’t quite match his ease. But the forced storybook moments of chemistry are predictable and cringeworthy, as we see distant re-enactments of what one thinks romance looks like.
Meanwhile, it examines the creation of reality TV with rose-colored glasses. The show’s producer (“Insecure”’s Yvonne Orji) is an exorbitantly well-meaning contributor to Dawn’s progressively rule-breaking wiles, though she is foiled by the program’s dismissive showrunner (a simple Torrence Coombs). There’s a spirit of true love trumping moneymaking that’s well within the fantasy of “The Wrong Paris,” though the film also has fun with its format: utilizing classic challenges to set the stage for tension and reward. Through this, we get glimpses into some of the side contestants, like the vulgar, biker chick Heather (Veronica Long) and the married-to-fantasy Cindy (Madeleine Arthur).
Even with classic rivalries and storybook romance attempts, “The Wrong Paris” just doesn’t scratch a genuine itch. Not all romances need to be deep and nuanced; but when you’ve got a movie like this pegged, the predictability, vapidity, and low-effort tropes don’t provoke any fluttering hearts. It’s flimsy and forgettable without tension or investment to inspire.
