Love Again Review

Plot: A young woman tries to ease the pain of her fiancé's death by sending romantic texts to his old cell phone number, and forms a connection with the man the number has been reassigned to.

 Film: Love Again

Director: Jim Strouse

Writer: Jim Strouse

Starring: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Sam Heughan, Celine Dion

Mira (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) is grieving the loss of her long-term boyfriend, and to help her cope with still feeling lost two years later, she begins texting his number, the only problem is that his number has been reassigned to journalist Rob’s (Sam Heughan) new work phone. Rob is truly moved by the unknown number’s words and when he’s assigned to write a piece about Celine Dion, he makes a connection with her through trying to figure out how to cope with the feelings he’s developing for someone he has never met. 

The most important factor in a romantic pairing on screen is the chemistry and there was plenty of it between Priyanka and Sam, though I’ve yet to see anyone look at Sam Heughan and not melt into it. There’s one scene in particular where Mira is asking would you rather questions, her go to dating tactic, this results in her calling Rob cute and the reaction he gives looks so genuine that I really believe it was unscripted, it was too perfect. Though a lot of the looks shared between the actors display the same yearning, so it is still well-matched casting.

Like a lot of rom coms these days, this film was wasted on cinema releases. The screen was practically empty, and I don’t expect it to stick around for more than a week -which is why I’m always quick to give the romantic films a watch when they’re on the big screen. These sorts of films are perfect Friday night at home watches, I do my best swooning from home anyway.

I say rom com, but there’s definitely not enough comedy in it for my liking. Obviously, the film centres around a very tough subject, so I appreciate that the writers wouldn’t have wanted to throw in jokes at any given moment, but I found that the jokes that did feature, generally weren’t that funny. The exception being Nick Jonas’ character of the douchebag Bumble date, the whole date was painfully accurate to the dating app experience, and it was made even funnier by the fact that he is the leads real-life husband. 

We’ve had a few of these awkward celebrity cameos in the last couple of years, most recently I can think of 80 for Brady, which would have been so much better being a film about Tom Brady without him needing to pop up every twenty minutes or so. Had Love Again been a film where Mira was a Celine Dion superfan, occasionally sticking on her music to deal with her trauma, I think I’d have felt differently about the film overall. Instead, we get Celine Dion, who looks phenomenal by the way, awkwardly shoehorned into the plot as Rob’s Clarence-esque guardian angel. It felt very forced and as a result I don’t think this is a film I’ll be adding into the rotation of go-to rom-coms, but I wouldn’t change the channel if it came on.