Love Hard (2021- Netflix) We don't know how anyone in their right mind can ever think there's some kind of hidden culture war on Christmas.....
Well, Baby Orange Trump makes it one of his favorite whines, but then we'd exclude him from any demographic group known as People In Their Right Mind......
If there is a war on Christmas, then surely its instigators get drowned out and decimated by the annual avalanche of TV Christmas movies pumped out Hallmark, Lifetime, GAC, Hulu, Netflix and several other streaming services whose names we can't remember at the moment.......
Like other Netflix holiday offerings, "Love Hard" sweats bullets to blend the freewheeling gags of a mainstream feature film rom-com with the traditional structure of a Hallmark Christmas movie.
Sometimes this ungainly mixture makes for a smooth, amusing brew.......and sometimes it falls flat on its ass.
We begin with the the usual picture perfect Hallmark-y shot of a big city........where typical, harried, 30-something Hallmark-y journalist Natalie (Nina Dobrev) chronicles her on-line dating disasters for public consumption.
But wait! Her latest tweetheart, an athletic hunk named Tag, looks like he's Mr. Right at long last......so Natalie deep-sixes caution and flies to Lake Placid for a surprise visit to Tag and his family.
Surprise, surprise......the online studly Tag turns out to be his former schoomate Josh(Jimmy O. Yang), a lonely nerd living in his parents' basement. Still desperate for some companionship, Josh promises to make amends for catfishing the flustered, outraged Nina by setting her up with the real Tag.
His only condition - for the benefit of his Christmas-centric family, Nina has to pretend she's really Josh's girlfriend.
Amid the usual picture-perfect Hallmark-y shots of a holiday-bedecked Lake Placid, the film milks a fair share of genuine laughs out of Nina's double deception.....masquerading as a soulmate to Josh and convincing Tag she's into the same rock-climbing and hiking hobbies as he is.
Even the most casual, once-and-awhile viewer of Christmas romcoms will know immediately that it's Natalie and Josh who belong together but neither will realize it until they' been properly humiliated by the reveal of their deceptions to the rest of the cast.
And so it goes....but in a movie like this, it's getting there that's provides the fun and we're surprised to admit that "Love Hard" did make us LOL more than few times.
The downside here comes from a total lack of any romantic spark and personal chemistry between Nina Dobrev and Jimmy O. Yang. The script neglects to give them any warmhearted scenes that would show their growing attraction to each other......and even worse, in too many shots, Dobrev seems more like Yang's uneasy babysitter rather than a potential match for him.
A fun viewing overall, so if you like your Christmas comedies to have more of a snap, crackle and pop to them (as opposed to the mirthless, carved-in-stone tropes of a Hallmark movie) then you might want to check this one out. Not a bad show for the season of Ho Ho Ho.....3 stars (***).
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