The maxim “expect little, forgive much” is apparently how to approach marriage; it may be a little depressing in real life, but it’s not a bad rule for movie romcoms, a genre in which, for whatever reason, the bar is extraordinarily low. For every His Girl Friday or When Harry Met Sally or Four Weddings, there are thousands of direct-to-streaming timewasters; if the films’ frequent lesson is that you’ll have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince, it also applies to the films themselves.
Happily, this will-they-won’t-they between two adorable wedding guests (Lucy Hale and Nat Wolff) may not feature an actual prince, he’s closer to a handsome dude in a crown than a lil fella on a lily-pad; by romcom standards, that’s a pretty solid recommendation to pucker up and give it a chance. Points in its favour include the relative humanity of the leads, who are both shockingly easy on the eye, and the characters they play are still recognisably rounded, flawed and mostly charming human beings. Early on they get together briefly, which means that we’re in for a film mostly about whether they will get back together. (As opposed to the romcom’s other favourite arc of having the characters dislike each other at the start and gradually move towards each other.) The reasons they are not immediately united are relatively convincing, being based on relatable complications that actually keep people from finding each other. Nobody here is working for the evil corporation that wants to shut down the cute little bakery run by the other party.
