The Hating Game (2021)

I can usually cope with chick-flicks. Especially movies adapted from chick fiction. I think they used to call them 'romance' but the march of time is inevitable and whatever works, it seems, to make it more accessible for its audience.

Having not read the book, I can't really claim to know how effective this is against the source material, but judging it purely on the cinematic experience, I have to say that as pretty as Lucy Hale is, she is some way short of being the likeable, feisty ingenue we are expected to believe she is. She fails to radiate as brightly as we would like.

As a romantic comedy, I struggled to laugh the requisite amount of times (5) in order for it to do justice to the genre. The 'hating' on show is never believable, whereas when the wall of distaste that was barely there to begin with crumbles to uncover the love story underneath, you are hard pressed to find what either of these two characters see in one another.

It's not terrible but fails to convince for the majority of the film. I feel like I'm being too hard on what is little more demanding than candy floss, knowing that I am far from the target demographic.

Harmless, time-consuming fluff.