Feb 1

Feb 1 'Love Ever After' movie review: 'A Valentine's Match'

An obnoxious cast of characters and a stilted, objectively bad script makes "A Valentine's Match" (premiering Feb. 1 as part of the Hallmark Channel's Love Ever After) a Valentine not worth sending or receiving.

In short: Fired from her job as a reality TV host, Natalie (Bethany Joy Lenz) returns home for Valentine's Day, only to find herself running the town festival's auction with her ex-fiancé Zach (Luke Macfarlane) thanks to two scheming mothers.

"Match" is an awkward, annoying exercise in cringe storytelling. The whole of the movie follows the formerly engaged Natalie and Zach being forced (time and again) to be in each other's company. Now, the "couple who used to date" is familiar territory for Hallmark Channel - the key to these movies is watching the leads fall back in love. It's romantic to see characters rediscover what they adored about each other. And the more natural and organically this happens, the better.

While it's not uncommon for former flames to be "forced" together in these type of movies to a certain degree - but "Match" is so broad and transparent that it actually borders on insulting. Natalie and Zach are reunited by the shallowest of plot drivers ever: their respective moms want to get them back together. That's it. No real reason given. Their moms stayed friends - so they hatch a lame plot to force Natalie and Zach back together - with one very specific goal in mind.

Frankly, it's kinda gross to watch a movie so lazily throw together such a brazenly artificial "plot." The moms are meddling to the point of being overbearing, if not flat-out manipulative. Their machinations are neither cute nor adorable - it's off-putting and frankly uninspired. While other Hallmark movies may feature parents who nudge the plot in a certain direction, these two moms repeatedly wrest control of the plot from the leads and steer it where it needs to go - which actually robs Natalie and Zach of agency. Character-driven stories always trump plot-driven stories -- but here, the moms are just lazy plot-driving tools.

At one point, virtually every character tells Natalie to try again with Zach. A more confident movie would simply allow Natalie's internal conflict to power the story - instead, "Hearts" relies on a revolving door of supporting characters repeat variations of "you two just belong together."

Arguably Zach is the only agreeable character in "Match," but that has a lot to do with Macfarlane's innate charm and the fact that Zach's primary character trait is just being a nice guy. Macfarlane keeps Zach as the most relatable and humane character - which is more than most of the other characters get or deserve. The moms are well-intentioned but smug and insufferable non-characters. Zach's small town friends have two modes: saccharine cute and pushy. Natalie's boyfriend is a cartoon of the "clearly NOT the right guy" trope that it's a foregone conclusion that he'll be dumped within the first few moments he pops up on screen. Natalie herself has a half-baked subplot about how she's lost her passion for her career - but "Hearts" makes the super odd decision to somehow baselessly connect her "lack of authenticity" with her failed relationship with Zach. The movie makes virtually no effort to connect these two story threads - aside from a character just saying “you haven’t been as authentic since you broke up with Zach.” Ugh. Honestly, were it not for the fact that Natalie's boyfriend is an aloof goober, it would be pretty easy to actually pull for Natalie to marshall her inner strength to just abandon the festival, leave her town and go back to Los Angeles - yes, at a certain point it's legitimately understandable to root against a Hallmark movie.

Final verdict: The plot is contrived. The characters are generally unlikable. “Hearts” is offensively lazy.