Matt Casey

This is like a hack stand-up, but as a movie (no offense to Jimmy O. Yang’s actual okay stand-up). While at times charming, and decently acted, If you have an internet connection, the outdated and unoriginal jokes will probably annoy you. One sassy quip from the main character’s requisite sassy friend was almost verbatim a tweet that made the rounds on Twitter ages ago. At one point, they do a cutesy “non-creepy” version of Baby It’s Cold Outside that is such an outright rip-off of a popular existing rewrite that the artist Lydia Liza has spoken out on it. There is a friendly/flirty debate early in the movie between the two leads about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. This bit is so old and well-trod, there were probably Die Hard ugly Christmas sweaters in thrift stores five years ago. Yet the film dwells on it, and is so proud of this premise that it references it in the title. In case you’re wondering, this is not a Chekov’s Gun situation - the movie has almost no parallels to Die Hard otherwise. There is no homage here, just microwave-defrosted pop-culture. Maybe it is on purpose - maybe the writers loved these other peoples’ ideas so much they decided to put them all in a movie for anyone who hadn’t heard them yet. That’s the most generous I can be, because watching Love Hard is like watching a presentation from your HR department that thinks it can connect with staff by using internet jokes and minion memes.