I tried hard to like “Office Romance.” I’m always in the mood for a good romantic comedy, and usually in the mood for one that might not quite be good but is still pleasant to watch. This one has the requisite pretty people, pretty settings, pretty needle-drops, and low-key mix-ups and misunderstandings, and I like the actors. But, boy, this movie fought me every step of the way, and I finally gave up and acknowledged that it is not just disappointing but unmistakably awful. It will be on my worst-of-the-year list for sure.
It opens with our two main characters, Jackie Cruz (Jennifer Lopez), CEO of New Jersey-based Cruz Airlines, and Daniel Blanchflower (Brett Goldstein of “Shrinking” and “Ted Lasso”) arriving for a dinner date, or, rather, dinner dates. While it is filmed to suggest they are going to have dinner together, the twist is that they are in different places, with different people, recalling the far-better opening of a far-better rom-com, “About Fate.”
Jackie seems dressed for a date; she refers to her “charming” emails setting it up, and the man on the other side of the table calls it a date, but she informs him that the dinner is a business meeting. He then cries about his divorce and tells her he masturbates to pictures of his ex-wife. Daniel is on a date with a woman he met at the gym, which starts promisingly, but she gets drunk and becomes disruptive. This is all the lead-up to the meet-cute the next day, when the top lawyer at Cruz Airlines (Bradley Whitford) chokes on a burrito. New on the job, Daniel is sent to the CEO’s office to represent Jackie at a deposition. Note: the company has a zero-tolerance policy for inter-office romantic relationships.
I know better than to care whether anything about the law is accurately portrayed in a film, and give wide leeway to abandon accuracy for the sake of humor, character, or moving the story forward. But here it is just contrived and lazy, and it detracts from our ability to care about the stakes when in the world of this movie: The outcome of not just litigation but also the entire fate of Jackie’s career and the company depends on whether she slept with someone, and defending the case somehow requires a detailed dossier of her sex life. Daniel impresses Jackie in the deposition and also by getting a very evident erection as he says goodbye to her. The next deposition involves a trip in Jackie’s plane (she’s the pilot, so it’s just the two of them) to the Dominican Republic (“paradise,” we are told), and…you know the rest.
This is followed by various efforts to prevent anyone from finding out, personal revelations, corporate upheavals, Jackie’s efforts to get respect from her father (Edward James Olmos) and the board of directors, a character getting stuck in the Holland Tunnel on the way to a crucial meeting and somehow arriving exactly at the right moment, plus (Chekhov alert!) a character who is very, very pregnant.
Very crude sexual material includes several dick jokes, many uses of a word that is said more casually in the UK but still considered misogynistic and ugly in the US, and a childbirth scene with two close-ups of a baby’s head with a lot of hair crowning between the mother’s legs, plus light-hearted references to a character’s having cut off a man’s head with a machete. In a different kind of movie, this would be part of a heightened, wildly farcical tone. But this movie wants to be a gentler, more romantic, glowy-but-almost-could-happen love story, with a touch of slo-mo in Lopez’s hair toss when Daniel first sees her. Much of it is jarring or, unforgivably, just lazy. I mean, the Holland Tunnel? Really?
The reason there are so many rom-coms is the immediate appeal, endless storyline, and comic potential in any romance, especially one that has to be kept secret, as well as having cultural conflicts and misunderstandings. In every category, this fails to come up with anything witty or imaginative. The dialogue sounds like it came out of an R-rated fortune cookie. Even worse, just when you think it’s over, there are extra scenes during the credits to prolong the agony.
