★½ (1½ out of 4)
Hammer another nail in the romcom coffin as “Office Romance,” now streaming silliness all over Netflix, can’t strike a spark even by rubbing Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein together. JLo, the Latinx goddess, can do this sort of thing in her sleep, and often has. Remember “Gigli” with Ben Affleck, the Oscar winner she married twice and then divorced? And maybe two-time Emmy winner Goldstein, the immortal, foul-mouthed Roy Kent of “Ted Lasso,” wasn’t meant to show his tender side. In this movie he masturbates to a photo his ex-wife. Ah, love sweet love!
Look, “Office Romance” had possibilities. I admit that. Goldstein, who wrote this piffle with his “Ted Lasso” collaborator Joe Kelly, is not one go gentle into a sex farce. R-rated words are said and repeated, even the “c” word.” They flow naturally from Goldstein, though Lopez seems more comfortable with the guardrails of romcom tradition.
Yet opposites attract has fueled many a Hollywood love story. I liked the setup. Lopez plays New Jersey airline CEO Jackie Cruz with a hardshell she borrowed from her tycoon daddy (Edward James Olmos). Ms. Cruz (nobody at work calls her Jackie and lives) enforces a zero-tolerance policy against what the title of the movie suggests.
Then in walks Goldstein as new company lawyer Daniel Blanchflower and all bets are off. The first-time bloke-ish Daniel sees his boss toss her hair like a slo-mo shampoo commercial, he’s hooked. “Holy shit,” says Daniel with proper, erection-producing awe as “Helen of Troy and Mr. Bean”—that’s what the script calls them—connect.
Hammer another nail in the romcom coffin.
“Make the audience swoon,” seems to be the order barked to the crew by director Ol Parker, who did the same thing with Julia Roberts and George Clooney in the equally awful “Ticket to Paradise.” Direction in this case seems to mean controlling the camera angles to make sure the star will look her best.
Later, when Daniel and Jackie—I still think of her as Ms. Cruz and you should to—try to secretly carry out their lust-to-love affair in places like an isolated beach in the Dominican Republic, that “Office Romance” descends into a cutsey quicksand that the Lopez/Goldstein star power can’t save us from. Even when Jodie Whittaker is introduced out of nowhere as Daniel’s incarcerated psycho sister, the one he never told Jackie about, the prevailing blandness smooths away rough edges.
I felt my skepticism matched on screen by a scene stealing Betty Gilpin as Ms. Cruz’s sharp-tongued, deeply pregnant deputy Sydney Bloom. “I fill my business emails with smiley faces and question marks so that I don’t sound too severe,” she says. But you know Sydney is fed up with everything she’s seeing. Me too. I recognize that many viewers won’t ask much more from a direct-to-Netflix romcom than a few passable hours of looking at pretty people in pretty places. But there are limits. You’ll find them all in “Office Romance.”