For many viewers, there’ll be something charmingly synthetic about Amazon’s milquetoast romcom Red, White and Royal Blue, another film aiming to show that gay love stories can be just as basic and sickly sweet as straight ones. Its overwhelming blandness is sort of the point, a sign of true representation, but vaguely admirable intentions only get the film so far – a win that it exists perhaps, but a loss for those hoping for something better than a Hallmark movie.
The painfully slow rise in gay stories that cater to a broader crowd has given us some crowd-pleasing winners, standout films like Love, Simon, Bros and Happiest Season, showing the importance and pleasure of watching same-sex romance on a bigger canvas, bursting out of the arthouse closet. But the much-anticipated adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s fan favourite novel is closer to last year’s beige weepie Spoiler Alert and the recent tide of queer Christmas movies made for TV or streamers, like Single All the Way and The Christmas Setup, as boringly by-the-books as it comes. This isn’t always a problem within the romance genre, but here it’s never done with enough fizz or feeling for us to invest more than a passing double-screened interest, a plane movie that never takes off the ground.
