This Movie Night is brought to you by my friend Evan who is a romantic comedy superfan and will be suggesting his favorite Rom-Coms for my posts. I know I said I’d post this one over the weekend but being unemployed is messing with my sense of time. Also I’m lazy and got caught up playing Skyrim again. But I digress. This edition of Movie Night is a movie from 2012 called Stuck in Love.
Allow me to give just a brief synopsis. Stuck in Love takes place over the course of a year in which a writer and his family each deal with love and it’s various joys and heartaches. I won’t give you the full rundown of the cast because the picture above has a list of every main character with the exception of Liana Liberato (If I Stay, don’t worry, I didn’t know who she was either). Now that I mention it, the poster is a bit misleading. It makes you think that Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars, Frozen) is a major player in this movie when she’s just an important side character.
I don’t want to dwell on the acting like I usually do because it was just okay. Everyone did a good job but it just wasn’t anything to rave about. The only part that stuck out to me was Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson, Fury), who should replaced Kristen Bell on the poster because he was not only a bigger character, but had one of the most emotional scenes in the entire movie.
The story was okay, it was familiar but different enough to keep my eyelids from getting heavy. Each character had her/his own little tweak that made them feel fresh as well as realistic and that helped keep me invested from beginning to end. The ending was actually quite predictable but you know what? I didn’t care. Stuck in Love was a fun movie to watch. There was even enough doubt in my mind of how things could turn out so when the end came, it was still satisfying. It also helped that there were three separate romances to follow and they were juggled pretty well so it never felt like one took precedence over the others.
Maybe I’m a little more biased than normal for this review. Romance is kind of my genre. Or maybe that means you should trust my review even more! I mentioned the ending being predictable, but the journey and the outcome were still complexish (it’s a word, trust me) and fun. This wasn’t like some grocery store paperback romance. You know, the kind with dude with chiseled abs and woman with windswept hair embracing by a river or something. Nor was this some Nicholas Sparks story where it’s a standard love story and you know someone is going to die.
You know what? I’m going to keep this review short. So let me wrap this all up. Stuck in Love is the perfect movie to watch on date night when you both decide to stay in, curl up on the couch, and watch a movie. Hell, even if you’re single this is still a great movie to just sit back and enjoy. It’s fun, it will make you smile, maybe even make you tear up a time or two, and gives you hope. A movie that’s fun AND gives you hope? What’s not to love?
Stuck in Love gets an 8 out of 11.