Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love, Guaranteed’ on Netflix, a Rachel Leigh Cook Rom-Com That Does Not Guarantee Laughs

Netflix rom-com Love, Guaranteed might be an opportunity for the mainstream to catch up with Rachel Leigh Cook. Since her 1999 breakthrough She’s All That, she appeared in independent films and a couple of go-nowhere Hollywood projects (Get Carter and Josie and the Pussycats). But more recently, she produced and starred in a fistful of Hallmark Channel movies, which seem to have influenced this Netflix venture, for better or worse.

LOVE, GUARANTEED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Susan (Cook) is a bighearted lawyer whose pro-bono cases are pushing her one-woman, two-employee firm toward bankruptcy. She’s also a workaholic whose professional dedication is pushing her one-woman, zero-man life toward lonelydom. Her fridge is full of Chinese takeout containers because she’s a female movie character, where the equivalent male movie character would just leave the Chinese takeout containers out on the coffee table. She drives a charming vintage VW jalopy named Zorro whose cassette deck is perpetually stuck playing Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now at high volume. She’s DOOMED.

Until. One day. Nick (Damon Wayans Jr.) walks into the office with a gimmick. He says he wants to sue a dating website called Love Guaranteed because he’s bearing down on 1,000 dates through the service and he hasn’t found love. It’s right there in the fine print: love is guaranteed in 1,000 dates or you can get a civil litigator to argue for six-figure settlements. And if you want to sue for fraud, Susan is your woman. She hesitates to take the case because, right, it sounds like total bull roar, and this guy, you know, what’s up with him? A thousand dates? Get outta here. But he writes a check for a retainer, and Susan’s pertinacious employees, Roberto (Sean Amsing) and Denise (Lisa Durupt), celebrate by signing her up for the site so she can go on dates for, in Roberto’s words, “Hashtag research!”

After two beastly dates and a no-show, Susan might start believing in Nick’s cause. He has all sorts of documentation about his dates, which he names as if they’re episodes of Friends, e.g., “The One Who Ate Paper.” They meet with the top corporate brass at Love Guaranteed, which was launched by a Paltrowish Goopalike played by Heather Graham. Perhaps Susan soon realizes that Nick isn’t the opportunist he seems to be and, hey, he might be a decent guy and sort of cute, which might either simplify or complicate everything.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Love, Guaranteed is a lot like every rom-com you’ve forgotten, whatever they’re called.

Performance Worth Watching: Cook shows off the finely honed skills of someone well-versed in broad comedies that play on TV and demand 49 percent of our attention.

Memorable Dialogue: After her terrible dates, Susan’s co-workers offer their support and some withering commentary on humanity’s impact on the environment:

“There’s plenty of fish in the sea,” Denise says.

“There’s also plenty of trash,” Roberto quips.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Is it me, or does Susan repeatedly park Zorro in the loading zone without repercussion? That shit drives me NUTS.

Anyway: Love COMMA Guaranteed exists on the shifting sands of the dumbest premise this side of an ’80s brain-swap comedy. We might overlook the several hundred holes in it if we could pin down any of these characters, who are culled from a book of cutout paper dolls and fluttering in a light breeze just out of our reach. Susan is acceptable as a slightly harried, slightly mopey, slightly perky but mostly just slight woman who tries to shrug off her loneliness as a side effect of her career commitments.

But to call Nick a cardboard cutout is to make cardboard look like a quadruple-pillow-topped mattress. He’s just this perfect man, a perfectly bland man, a perfectly bland, empty man, a plot ‘bot programmed to reveal the elements of his wholecloth earnestness until a phony-ass third-act wrench is thrown into the story — a wrench that Susan could feasibly explain away with two sentences, but she doesn’t, because then we wouldn’t be subject to a perfunctory Sad Montage, which fails miserably at making us feel sad, because the movie only inspires in us the type of vague derision we feel towards McDonald’s after we felt obligated to finish off that Big Mac when two-thirds of it was plenty, and then we have a gut-ache from all the grease, carbs and self-loathing.

Where was I? Right — the romantic male lead has all the charisma and depth of a stump fence. At first I thought he was a charmless A-hole, but he soon revealed himself to be a charmless void, played by Wayans with detached ennui. The movie has a mistaken idea of what’s funny, and is about as plausible as any fantasy with wizardmagic and fire-spewing dragons. If I never see another movie with a likeable enough star playing a hastily sketched character with contrived quirks, and going on dates with punchlines, and surrounded by wacky co-workers, and participating in and/or subject to climactic public declarations of love, it will be too soon. I hope Zorro gets f—ing towed.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Love, Guaranteed sells itself as a comedy, but I never laughed, so I’m going to sue it for fraud.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Love, Guaranteed on Netflix