A Date with Love

A date with dismal disappointment

Spoilers (if you care)

This movie wasn't bad. Make no mistake it was so far from good that it's vanished over the horizon, but it wasn't so bad that it felt like pulling teeth out of your own face with a pair of pliers. No, this movie was something wholly worse than that. It was indescribably bland and boring. I love bad movies (as you've likely deduced by this point), but this film was not even close to that. This was something that any sane man would dread like devil. It's a Hallmark Original with a stupid name, abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Date with Love is a 2016 TV movie directed by Ron Oliver for The Hallmark channel. For the uninitiated, the Hallmark channel is a subsidiary of the Hallmark greeting card company. It's primary trade is in family daytime TV for the US market, cooking shows and the like. They also, rather infamously, produce their own movies that premier exclusively on the channel. And these movies are renowned for their low quality, white middle class paranoia and fantasising about rich men settling down with dull women from Wyoming and rich women settling down with dull army veterans from Michigan or some such guff.

Date with Love is a dull story about a dull boy who asks his favourite movie star to prom. She says yes after a having a break up on the red carpet of her new movie Heart full of Wind (good god thats a bad title) to improve her reputation. She instead meets and falls in love with the boys english teacher, a handsome Soldier-come-author-come-english teacher and the boy falls in love with his tomboy childhood friend who wears at least 4 brooches at anyone time. I can't remember any names because, frankly, the characters are just piles of tropes and convention vaguely shaped like human beings. Like Frankenstein's script.

Everything about this film is mediocre. Its shot mediocrely, its acted mediocrely and the production is mediocre too. It screams of apathy and a lack or inspiration or insight into anything other than the wants of the stereotypical American housewife. It was made in very much the same way as a Hallmark greeting card is. As quickly, cheaply and industrialised a process as possible. But unlike a greeting card, this movie doesn't inspire feelings of happiness. It only creates ceaseless boredom that makes the hour and half runtime feel like The Sorrow and the Pity, and about as depressing. And they didn't even have the decency to make the dialogue cringe inducing enough to be memorable. Even the sassy younger sister isn't memorable as anything other than the sassy younger sister.

I was originally going to review two of these together, but the very idea of a Hallmark double feature fills me with the kind dread I normally reserve for dentist appointments so you're stuck with just the one review for now, maybe next year? To cut a short story even shorter. Movie bad, no watch.