Stream It Or Skip It: ‘2 Hearts’ on Netflix, a Lightly Faith-Based Story About Love, Death and Organ Donation

2 Hearts is now on Netflix, and you know what that means — it’s BOATS (Based On a True Story) time! The not-too-heavily faith-based movie adapts Eric Gregory’s nonfiction book All My Tomorrows: A Story of Tragedy, Transplant and Hope, telling two parallel stories, one about a 19-year-old college student, and the other about the heir to a booze fortune (in real life, he was Jorge Bacardi, as in the ubiquitous rum). Of course, the stories eventually intertwine, with the hopes that we’ll be profoundly moved — but that’s never a sure thing, is it?

2 HEARTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Meet your voiceover narrator, Chris Gregory (Jacob Elordi). He tells us how his wise mom says people either live their lives like nothing’s a miracle or everything’s a miracle, and he chooses the latter. We first see him on a lovely beach, and then on a gurney as he’s rushed into the hospital. His family and girlfriend sit next to his comatose body before he interrupts the scene, telling us that the story actually begins many years before he was born. Here we meet Jorge Bolivar (Adan Canto), who has a degenerative lung condition. He was once told he wouldn’t live to see 20, but now he’s 30, so take that, world!

The movie jumps back forward to teenage Chris in the late 2000s or so as he deals with his loving mother Grace (Kari Matchett) and chilly father Eric (Tahmoh Penikett). He gets into Loyola University, where his grades ain’t great but he meet-cutes Sam (Tiera Skovbye) TWICE, when their bodies literally bump into each other in class — what class? Generic “class,” you know, the type of class with books and an instructor and lectures and chalkboards all in the service of learning some manner of nonspecific knowledge — and then literally bump into each other again later in a hallway. I think this means God really really wants them to be together, although I can’t be 100 percent certain about that. Anyway, Chris is an awkward-goofy charmer with an irrepressible personality, and he eventually worms his way into Sam’s heart like it’s an apple. She starts a volunteer service called Safety Buddies that gives students free rides hither and yon, and he’s the only one who signs up. He can’t even drive! It’s like so ridiculous. He’s smitten as hell, and so much good clean fun, she has no choice but to fall in frickin’ love.

Back in the 1970s or so, Jorge catches the eye of a stewardess, Leslie (Radha Mitchell), and they share a moment. Being a rich guy who’s veep of his family’s international liquor corp, he can afford to engineer several more such moments by stalking her to whatever airport she lands in next. Good thing he was so charming the first time, eh? There’s this one time when he tracks her to Hawaii and they spend her brief layover on the beach, where they splash each other and he scares her by wiggling a live crab at her. She notices the big scar on his muscley back, and he tells her about his ailment. Jorge shouldn’t exert himself too much, but it becomes clear once we see these two basking in a postcoital glow that he apparently exerted himself just fine the night before.

How will Jorge and Chris’ lives connect? In a totes divine manner, bro! I’m no spoileypants but it’s kind of right there in the title of the book the movie’s based on. And even without that, we can definitely smell it coming in a general sense, if not necessarily in a specific sense, with all the ins and outs and what-have-yous of the story.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Pick a Lifetime/Hallmark/Trinity Broadcasting Network movie, pick any Lifetime/Hallmark/Trinity Broadcasting Network movie. Also, remember Fox Faith movies? No? Maybe? There was one with Abigail Breslin in it called The Ultimate Gift. It wasn’t great. It was more faithy than 2 Hearts, but almost as weepy.

Performance Worth Watching: Mitchell is the highest-profile cast member here, and she’s a true pro, bringing some grace to the script until it abandons her to the awkward mawk of the third act.

Memorable Dialogue: “I notice that you cough a lot,” Leslie says to Jorge, using words that human beings often say to each other.

Sex and Skin: None. The Big Guy is always watching, y’know.

Our Take: 2 Hearts wears its two hearts, four lungs, two spinal cords, 20 billion capillaries, two vas deferenses and all the other organs you’d find in two human male bodies on its sleeve. It’s earnest and tender with a hokiness level that busts the scale at times. The only subtext is something to do with Jesus, whose name isn’t brought up in vain or in any other manner, but the Big Guy is mentioned a couple times, once even as “the Big Guy.” The film’s faith-basedness isn’t so overt that people’s prayers are answered or characters take a walk through the woods and find Kirk Cameron standing there waiting to take you into his righteous arms — but it’s there, in some angels-this and miracles-that type dialogue, because the movie is about the angel of death and miracle of life, or maybe that’s supposed to be the angel of life and the miracle of death? The Big Guy works in mysterious ways, and at this point in the review, you’ll know if this movie will work for you. Or not. I’m in the latter camp.

The performances in the movie keep it from falling apart. Mitchell and Canto kindle a little something real in their romance, and Skovbye brings her character the grounded sincerity it needs to balance Elordi’s class-clownish overtures. The characters are a little bland, but you won’t actively dislike any of them; maybe you’ll even root for their happiness a little. None of the preceding stands a chance when the plot kicks into high gear for the third act, which yanks a big rug from under our feet and becomes a maudlin trudge through endless weepy scenes that are part disease-of-the-week TV-movie tearjerk manipulation, part Jesuit-endorsed organ-donor propaganda. (Am I a cynic for finding the movie’s most heavily dramatic scenes to also be its funniest scenes? Maybe. I’m only human.) If you don’t already know that being an organ donor is the right thing to do, this movie will pound that point home with a vengeance. Did it really need to be faith-based, though? That content feels like an afterthought, tossed into the screenplay to assert a few spiritual things without getting too pushy or preachy. Anyway, worthy subject matter, hamhanded execution.

Our Call: SKIP IT, unless you’re tuned in to this kind of light religious-affirmation stuff.

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.

Watch 2 Hearts on Netflix