Mira Ray (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) tries to ease the pain of her fiancé’s death by sending romantic texts to his old mobile phone number. That number has been re-assigned to Rob Burns (Sam Heughan) for his work phone. He is intrigued and touched by the messages and instigates an ‘accidental’ meeting with her and they start dating but he does not tell her that he has been receiving her texts.
That may sound like the set up for a standard romcom that will follow the normal template. It is, but it is also so much less.
The incredibly wooden Heughan spends the entire film with a puzzled look on his face. Maybe he is wondering why he read such an abject script, with no less than 7 writers, and still took the part. Or maybe he is trying to work out why normally reliable supporting players Russell Tovey and Celia Imrie have adopted terrible American accents. Of all the bad moments for Heughan, the worst is when he gets to eulogise about basketball, which comes across as am odd thing for a British guy to do, especially when it morphs into a speech about how great America is.
But that is not the worst of it. So that Mira and Rob can spend very little time working they are given typical romcom character jobs. She is an author of children’s books. He is a journalist. Not a real one, but a movie type journalist who is given and endless amount of time to write a single article. In this case, it is a puff piece about Celine Dion. That means, that the story grinds to a halt periodically for her to appear so she can be told how great she is or to impart some wisdom. And boy, if you think her singing is bad, you have to see her acting. It is no surprise to see her name in both the writing and production credits.
Jonas is fine and Lydia West and Steve Oram add some spark as Rob’s colleague and boss, but this is otherwise pretty dismal.
Rating: 2 out of 10