Celine Song earned enough goodwill from her debut feature Past Lives that her second film deserves a look even if its reviews are less impressive. It assembles a strong cast to explore a bold premise about how important material wealth is to a relationship. Unfortunately it’s a bust. Song raises the question only to offer the usual, familiar answer that love conquers all. Worse, she flubs her cultural references and fails to get strong performances out of the actors, making this only a middling rom-com.

Lucy is a successful matchmaker in New York who has a cynical view of romance and strives to achieve matches using pragmatic criteria. Height, weight, attractiveness, wealth and so on are all valid ways to determine a couple’s compatibility. She is often frustrated about her clients’ unrealistic expectations but remains hopeful that she can find someone for everyone. While attending the wedding of a client she has successfully matched, she is hit on by Harry, the groom’s brother. Lucy at first suggests that he contacts her agency for her matchmaking services but he persists in his interest in her specifically. At the same time, she runs into John, her ex-boyfriend who is working as a server at the wedding. Lucy used to aspire to be an actress but has given it up while John is still trying. They were happy and loved each other but Lucy broke up with him after beginning to resent him for being perpetually broke. She lets Harry take her out on a date and is impressed by her wealth but tells him that they are a bad match. He is a perfect ten in every category and he could do much better than her. He disagrees, framing it as a business decision that she is a good investment, and so they begin a relationship.

A truly cynical take on the rom-com genre would refreshing indeed and I found it delightful to watch Lucy list out statistics in that matter-of-fact way of hers. When she assuages her client’s last-minute wedding jitters by telling that being motivated by her sister’s jealousy is valid, I was hopeful that her Machiavellian qualities are genuine. Unfortunately this film takes the more conventional route of boldly asserting her to be materialistic, only to reveal that she is anything but. Love still conquers all in the end and all the statistics she cites fail to capture who a person really is. Not only is this trite and unsatisfying, it also ducks the question of how she is and continues to be successful at matchmaking when all she has are those statistics. It would have been more honest to have her junk all that and admit that there is no replacement to meeting and spending time with someone to actually get to know them. But no, she gets to have romantic love and also success at her career because she’s just that good.

It’s not much of a spoiler that John is in fact her one true love, poor though he is. Among the many other problems with this is that Song cast Chris Evans as John, making him entirely too good-looking to be the underdog. Worse still, Evans and Dakota Johnson. who plays Lucy, have little chemistry together. They seem more like old college roommates rather than ex-lovers. The only reason we have to believe that Lucy still loves him is that she says so. The film relies too heavily on music to emote and even the song choices feel off to me. As to what love itself actually is, Song offers no answer. The characters merely claim that it is the easiest thing, implying that you’ll know it when you feel and so that it is ineffable. This is of course unsatisfying and incompatible with Lucy’s previous focus on practical measures of relationship compatibility. If she were honest, we should have been shown her ditching her previous approach and advising her clients differently.

So this was a disappointing miss for me. It’s a rom-com that hints towards being a deconstruction while being actually traditional. It would have been so much more interesting to fully follow through on its premise. Why not for example take a more Asian approach, that love doesn’t have to be initially present but can be developed over time, deliberately and consciously, between compatible partners?