Critic Reviews

It’s ridiculous, and it’s wonderful. Falling in love is stupid like that.

The movie is hysterical, and at just under 90 minutes, the gag never wears thin.

Every trope, twist, and trick of the genre is up for skewering in the comedy, but the film keeps things light and smart, never dipping into darkness or crass jokes. It’s funny because it’s clever, but it’s also never cruel.

Isn’t It Romantic pulls off a sweet sleight-of-hand trick as a rom-com-within-a-rom-com, mocking all of the classic rom-com tropes while still letting us indulge in them. The movie is having its gourmet cupcake and eating it too.

The best gag comes from rom-com world’s cloying PG-13-ness.

Isn’t It Romantic walks the line between subversive and sendup. It gleefully makes fun of the well-known tropes of romantic comedies, while also satisfying our desire to delight in said tropes.

It’s a feature-length in-joke for fans who will always pause if My Best Friend’s Wedding pops up during a lazy Saturday afternoon channel-surfing session, but who ultimately consider rom-coms a slightly shameful guilty pleasure.

Isn’t It Romantic stays pretty surface level, which makes for a fine and pleasurable viewing experience, but doesn’t exactly do anything to show that rom-coms would be better if the best friends had more of an inner life, for example. In fact, it just kind of redeems the formula in some ways.

Wilson is beautiful but far from typical Hollywood beautiful which underscores the film’s wink-nudge absurdity. She’s also funny as hell, delivering deadpan with Aussie-approved aplomb.

It pokes fun at falling in love on screen, but it’s smart and sweet enough make us fall for it as well.