This romcom set in a Manhattan publishing house is about as bland and as easily consumed as a cone of soft-serve ice-cream on a hot day. It’s essentially a sticky extrusion of sugar, trans fats and trapped air in cinematic form. Director Peter Hutchings has adapted a bestselling novel of the same name by Sally Thorne that pits perky executive assistant Lucy (Lucy Hale, from the Netflix series Riverdale and its spin-off Katy Keene) against square-jawed rival assistant Joshua (Austin Stowell, Hale’s co-star in Fantasy Island). He is a Waspy corporate type who turns out to be more pleasant than he first seems.
As the title suggests, the two begin their relationship by seemingly loathing each other. They clash over issues of taste, given that Lucy started out in an upmarket literary fiction publisher and Joshua worked for a more mass-market house that published trashy supermarket-bound titles. The merger of their two firms results in the two sharing an office – desks facing each other across a gulf of class, opposing values and a rug – as they minister to the needs of co-CEOs Sakina Jaffrey and Corbin Bernsen.
As is the way with these things, the protagonists are powerless to resist their mutual attraction, and their relationship turns more carnal in that classic device for inspiring love in such films: the confines of a lift. Before long they have a discreet office romance going, which involves attending a wedding together, spells where they break up and then get back together a couple of times, and a rival love interest in the shape of Damon Daunno’s nerdy graphic designer. All the squares on the romcom bingo card are eventually filled.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to deny that Hutton and Stowell have a palpable chemistry. Now that the likes of Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey have moved on to building sportswear empires or flirting with careers in politics, a new generation of blandly good-looking romcom actors need to start cutting their teeth somewhere.
• The Hating Game is released on 15 August on digital platforms.
