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“Isn’t It Romantic” tries to have its red velvet cupcake and eat it too, and though it’s tasty and enjoyable while you’re watching it, you’ll realize how hungry you are for something heartier soon after you’ve come down from your sugar high.

It's as high a high concept as you can imagine: A woman who hates romantic comedies finds herself stuck inside one. You could give the entire elevator pitch in the time it takes to press the button for the floor you want. But the brassy Aussie Rebel Wilson , consistently charming and game as always for everything that comes her way, finds subtlety and sweetness within this broad premise with her trademark sly, deadpan delivery. She’s raunchy but tender and easy to root for—so much so, that you’ll wish “Isn’t It Romantic” had taken even more chances and allowed her the opportunity to do the same.

The film from director Todd Strauss-Schulson (“A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas”) and screenwriters Erin Cardillo and Dana Fox & Katie Silberman places Wilson at the center of a tricky balancing act. “Isn’t It Romantic” simultaneously ridicules and embraces the many, many clichés of the rom-com genre. It knows these movies are pure formula, and it makes fun of that formula in myriad and amusing ways, including overt references to such predecessors as “ Pretty Woman ,” “ Notting Hill ” and “13 Going on 30.” But by the end, it’s also pretty much delivered that exact same formula with sincere enthusiasm, which makes the whole exercise feel like a bit of pointless wheel-spinning.

It’s a tough feat to pull off, regardless of the genre. Edgar Wright managed it beautifully with his Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy of “ Shaun of the Dead ,” “Hot Fuzz” and “The World’s End.” “Isn’t It Romantic” mostly coasts on Wilson’s likability and the power of recognition: a particularly overused song, some hackneyed character traits, a well-worn narrative device or a tidy way of wrapping things up to achieve a happy ending, etc. But every once in a while, it has something to say about what’s problematic about these familiar film tropes. Why must the heroine always have a flamboyantly gay BFF, and why does he have no life of his own outside of hers? Why must she have a female office rival who hates her for no apparent reason, when they should be working together to topple the patriarchy?

Some food for thought here and there, but “Isn’t It Romantic” mostly serves pleasing, bite-sized nibbles.

Wilson gives it her all, though, as Natalie, a young, single woman living in a dingy New York apartment and working as an architect at a firm where no one appreciates her. That is, except for her work pal Josh (Wilson’s playful “ Pitch Perfect ” co-star Adam Devine), who clearly has a crush on her while dwelling in the friend zone. One day on the way home from work, she gets mugged on a subway platform, bonks her head and wakes up in the hospital. Suddenly, the world around her has transformed. It’s a wonderland of flattering lighting and flirty doctors. Flowers and cupcakes are everywhere. The bustling NYC streets smell like lavender and the tinkling piano of Vanessa Carlton’s catchy “A Thousand Miles” follows her wherever she goes. Her surly neighbor from across the hall is now a stereotypically wisecracking gay man who loves makeover montages ( Brandon Scott Jones, who gets plenty of zingers). And in one of the sharpest insights, Natalie now lives in an impossibly spacious, chic apartment with insane amounts of closet space for her vast shoe collection—the kind of real estate very few people could realistically afford.

Yes, she now lives in the very kind of romantic comedy she’s long despised. (And yes, for those of you keeping score at home, that’s two movies in as many weeks in which our heroine suffers a head injury and wakes up to a different life, between this and “ What Men Want .”) 

Natalie’s task is to figure out what life lesson she must learn in order to return to her regular life. But she still takes time to enjoy the fantasy, including a whirlwind romance with a wealthy, hunky real estate developer (an earnest and goofy Liam Hemsworth ) that includes a candlelight dinner on his yacht and a helicopter trip to the Hamptons. (Their dramatic first kiss in the rain—in the middle of the street where the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building appear to be only about a block away from each other—is good for a chuckle.) Meanwhile, Josh gets to enjoy his own out-of-this-world love affair with Priyanka Chopra ’s impossibly gorgeous and glamorous swimsuit model/yoga ambassador—the kind of passionate relationship that naturally opens Natalie’s eyes to what she’d been missing all along.

Of course, it all concludes with a mad dash to make some last-minute, very public proclamations of love, followed by a second dance number when the first exuberant one alone would have been just fine. By the end, it all feels like overkill, and the movie barely lasts 90 minutes (and couldn’t have sustained its central gimmick much longer). But your face will hurt from smiling so hard—and you may even have a toothache afterward.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Isn't It Romantic (2019)

Rated PG-13 for language, some sexual material, and a brief drug reference.

Rebel Wilson as Natalie

Adam DeVine as Josh

Liam Hemsworth as Blake

Priyanka Chopra as Isabella

Betty Gilpin as Whitney

• Todd Strauss-Schulson

Writer (story by)

• Erin Cardillo
• Katie Silberman

Cinematographer

• Simon Duggan
• Andrew Marcus
• John Debney

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Isn't It Romantic review – romcom parody mostly hits its target

In a fun, glossy take down of age-old genre tropes, Rebel Wilson wakes up in an alternate universe, dominated by romantic comedy cliches

T he practice of spoofing romantic comedy cliches is by no means novel, the territory so ripe for ridicule that it’s even spawned entire films devoted to knowing jabs. But because of how easy it is to poke fun at the genre, such ribbing can often feel lazy, highlighting tropes even a casual consumer would know all too well, and given how it remains a mostly dying genre, also a bit mean-spirited. In 2014’s They Came Together , such observations worked best as stand-alone skits but felt strained when forced to stretch to a 90-minute runtime.

In 2019, the romantic comedy is in somewhat better shape after last year saw Crazy Rich Asians become a global smash and Netflix engineer a much-viewed “Summer of Love” with a multi-film campaign that provided evidence of impassioned interest in the genre, albeit living room-based. It’s not quite a sure thing again but its success on the small screen, with romcoms of old on heavy streaming rotation, means that audiences are as well versed as ever on the nuts and bolts that lead to that heavily soundtracked wedding-based finale. Glossy Valentine’s gamble Isn’t It Romantic aims to do two things: provide a rare, wide-releasing romantic comedy from a big studio while also listing and laughing at the genre’s overly familiar plot points.

As a girl, Natalie (Rebel Wilson) grew up enraptured with the Pretty Woman narrative, investing in an ideal that would see her receive a happy ever after. But as her mother informs her at a young age, fiction and reality are wildly different, especially for women who don’t look like Julia Roberts. As a woman living in New York, she’s made aware of this on a daily basis, living in a dingy apartment and regularly denigrated in the workplace. But after a mugging leaves her hospitalised, Natalie wakes up in an alternate universe, one that looks like every romantic comedy she has ever grown to criticise. The streets are clean, her apartment is outsized, she has an offensively stereotyped gay best friend and a love interest in the shape of hunky mogul Blake (Liam Hemsworth), all soundtracked to Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles.

By inserting Wilson into the parody, Isn’t It Romantic avoids some of the pitfalls of its spoofier predecessors. She’s an audience member incarnate, commenting on the silliness of the world she now inhabits with hyper-awareness and mostly disdain, increasingly tired of the constructed nature of her slicker yet emptier new life. What’s surprisingly impressive about the film is just how much effort is put into the intricate new world. Earlier scenes, in real New York, are drab, muted and easily recognisable for anyone actually living in New York while her romcom universe is carefully, extravagantly designed with bright, vibrant colours. There are potted plants on subway platforms, cupcake stores adorning street corners and even a shift in how the film is styled, from the cinematography right down to the editing, with credit due to director Todd Strauss-Schulson, who managed something similar with slasher movie parody The Final Girls. It’s invested, detailed world-building, the kind one would expect from a sci-fi offering.

There’s similar box-ticking with the script, pushing Wilson into hackneyed scenarios from a karaoke set piece to the world’s most overblown first date. It’s in the mechanics of the plot that the film faces a stumble, the thin jumble of a narrative not always meeting the high standard set by the film’s sleek new world and while some cliches are acutely observed, others feel less well-picked, an inconsistent script that feels a few drafts away from something far sharper. Wilson comments on how offensive her flamboyant gay best friend is but so much of the humour that follows with his character feels less tied to a recognition of a stereotype and more just laughing at a flamboyant gay man. There’s also a confused final stretch that takes one step forward and then two steps back. There’s a rare, worthy message of self-love being more important than romantic love (a hark back to the hugely underrated How to be Single, Wilson’s last film with writers Dana Fox and Katie Silberman) and valuing a woman in the workplace over a woman in the kitchen but the film also can’t help including a more conventional, crowd-pleasing clinch and a rather misjudged final dance number.

Wilson is a mostly engaging lead and while she’s not a natural with some of the later stage sentiment, her offhand line delivery elevates a number of throwaway jabs and she’s well-suited to physical comedy. The cast around her are all mostly forgettable, with Hemsworth not quite delivering the charm one would expect from such a character, Adam Devine not quite convincing as the best friend with an unrequited crush and Priyanka Chopra not quite interesting enough as the spiky love rival.

There’s fun to be had here, especially for fans of the genre, although in an interesting, last-minute move, Warners sold the film outside of America to Netflix, a sign that while the romantic comedy might live on, it might not be on the big screen.

Isn’t It Romantic is released in the US on 13 February and in the rest of the world on Netflix on 28 February

• Rebel Wilson
• Comedy films
• Romance films
• Priyanka Chopra

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Isn't It Romantic (2019)

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Isn't it romantic, common sense media reviewers.

Laughs, thoughtful messages in charming romcom satire.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

By picking apart clichés of many romantic comedies

Natalie is forthright, genuine, a thoughtful, reli

Cartoonish violence played for laughs: Nat is hit

In a knowing joke, Nat and her suitors can kiss, b

Cursing is ironic: Though characters say "s--t" an

Characters drink in bars, including a scene in whi

Parents need to know that Isn't It Romantic satirizes romantic comedies, following a woman named Natalie (Rebel Wilson) who gets trapped in a romcom world after suffering a head injury. The content is largely appropriate for teens. Violence is confined to cartoonish interludes in which Nat is struck by a car…

Positive Messages

By picking apart clichés of many romantic comedies, film encourages viewers to think about the genre, what it says about our cultural views on womanhood. Themes of courage, self-control are clear.

Positive Role Models

Natalie is forthright, genuine, a thoughtful, reliable person who cares about her work, her loved ones. She's not mocked for her rare-in-movies body type (except for joke about her being built like a "truck"). Blake is a stereotype inserted into the action to make points about typical romcom leads and standards of masculinity. Donny is also a stereotype -- in this case, a prancing gay man -- but his character is also used to make point about how gay men are often portrayed in romantic comedies.

Violence & Scariness

Cartoonish violence played for laughs: Nat is hit on the head twice, mugged, hit by a car. There's no blood, and impact of incidents is minimized.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

In a knowing joke, Nat and her suitors can kiss, but action then immediately cuts away to a waking-up-in-bed romantic scene before she can actually have sex with anyone. A male character is shown repeatedly and at length in a towel, strolling out of the shower shirtless; Nat says that his penis is huge, the size of a large restaurant pepper grinder.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Cursing is ironic: Though characters say "s--t" and "bitch" (both jokingly and insultingly), anytime anyone tries to say the word "f--k," some type of bleeping noise (from a truck, an alarm clock, etc.) drowns out the sound. At one point, Nat screams that she's in a romcom, and it's "f--king PG-13!" One unbleeped f--k is heard, when Nat wakes up from her dream and finds she's able to curse again. Swearing also includes "t-ts," "crap," "goddamn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink in bars, including a scene in which Nat downs two shots of liquor to get the courage to sing onstage.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Isn't It Romantic satirizes romantic comedies, following a woman named Natalie ( Rebel Wilson ) who gets trapped in a romcom world after suffering a head injury. The content is largely appropriate for teens. Violence is confined to cartoonish interludes in which Nat is struck by a car and hit in the head, both of which are played for laughs. Though Nat is interested in sex and talks about it, all she can do with her suitors is kiss -- after which the camera cuts repeatedly to a morning-after scene with her love interest ( Liam Hemsworth ) shirtless in a towel. Nat estimates a man's penis size as "pepper grinder" (the kind the waiter has to bring out to you). Characters drink in bars; Nat downs two shots of liquor to get courage to sing karaoke. Characters say "s--t" and "bitch," but all except one instance of "f--k" are drowned out by noise, comically. Stereotyped characters (competitive women, shallow men, a flamboyant gay man) are used to make points about clichéd characterizations in other movies. Mocking the romcom genre's conventions will make viewers consider what such movies tend to say about women and romance and may spark conversations about the way women are depicted. Themes of courage and self-control are also clear. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the story.

ISN'T IT ROMANTIC's Natalie ( Rebel Wilson ) thinks love is pretty stupid and romantic comedies are even dumber. But when a mysterious head injury traps her in a parallel romcom universe, she's forced to play out the genre's conventions in hopes of escaping back to her own life. All romantic comedies end in true love and a kiss, right? So if she can get gorgeous billionaire Blake ( Liam Hemsworth ) to fall in love with her, she should be good to go. But although her apartment has suddenly transformed into a luxurious palace and her closet is filled with gorgeous clothes and matching shoes, there are downsides to her new life -- chiefly, that her best friends, Whitney ( Betty Gilpin ) and Josh ( Adam Devine ), aren't close to her anymore. Can Nat find her way out of a world that's all surface and no substance, and back into her imperfect but real life?

Is It Any Good?

Wilson is an absolute hoot in a starring role that makes the most of her quirky talents -- but make no mistake, this takeoff on clichéd romcoms is anything but frivolous and forgettable. Instead, its sharp gags pack a punch, making points about both femininity and oft-reviled "chick flicks" that will resonate with viewers, particularly if they've sat through more than one movie about a beautiful woman who isn't quite whole until the true-love kiss at the end of her story. Nat ticks off the genre's old chestnuts in an early scene: Romantic comedy women wake up in full hair and makeup. They're always tripping over things, which those around them find charming, even though in real life "they'd think she has muscular dystrophy." And most of all, these imperfect cinematic manic pixies need men to complete them.

So when her head injury dumps Nat into a romcom world, she's at first surprised to see her dirty NYC block filled with flower beds and cupcake shops. Her dismissive neighbor has been transformed into a queeny best friend who waits around in Nat's apartment for the moment she needs a cocktail-gossip session or a makeover. And men everywhere flock to her, particularly the hot but jerky Blake, a client who didn't even notice Nat before. Romcoms also end with the main character falling in love -- so surely if Nat can get Blake to declare his love for her, that will bring this bizarre chapter of her life to an end. But, as she soon discovers, Blake's shallow affection is worth far less than Nat's true feelings for herself. She doesn't need a man to round off her life -- she's complete, and wonderful, all on her own. That realization is what will leave her ready to take on the world confidently and on her own terms, including a romantic relationship with a man who's already proved himself her equal.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what Natalie learns about confidence, body acceptance, and friendship by the end of Isn't It Romantic . Can you think of other movies that celebrate and empower women and girls? Do most romantic comedies do this? Or the opposite?

How does Natalie demonstrate self-control and courage in her quest to return to her real life? Why are these important character strengths ?

A head injury is what leads to Natalie's adventures here. Can you think of other movies in which a head injury gives someone powers or somehow changes his or her life in a magical way? Why do you think filmmakers use this plot device? Is it realistic? Is it a cliché? What happens in real life to people who receive head injuries?

Movie Details

• In theaters : February 13, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : May 21, 2019
• Cast : Rebel Wilson , Priyanka Chopra , Liam Hemsworth
• Director : Todd Strauss-Schulson
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Comedy
• Character Strengths : Courage , Self-control
• Run time : 88 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : language, some sexual material, and a brief drug reference
• Last updated : December 31, 2022

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‘Isn’t It Romantic’ Review: A Meta Rom-Com That Earns Its Place Among the Genre Greats

Todd Strauss-Schulson’s delightful movie carefully walks the line between mocking romantic comedies and giving the genre a loving tribute.

Although the romantic comedy is experiencing a bit of a resurgence, its heyday was definitely in the 80s and 90s to the point where its conventions and tropes become so predictable that the genre kind of burned itself out, especially as studios moved away from the mid-budget film they could sell on star power alone. However, the tropes are so indelible that they’re instantly recognizable, and director Todd Strauss-Schulson has a lot of fun poking fun at those tropes while still showing love to the rom-com. His new movie Isn’t It Romantic balances lightly mocking the rom-com while also showing it the adoration only a die-hard fan could. A pure delight from start to finish, Isn’t It Romantic manages to be funny while still finding a new angle on a staid genre.

Natalie ( Rebel Wilson ) lives a bland, boring life where she doesn’t have the confidence to promote her work as an architect or even notice the affections of her friend and co-worker Josh ( Adam Devine ). She also hates romantic comedies, which she sees as phony, contrived, and pushing negative messages, much to the consternation of her friend Whitney ( Betty Gilpin ). When Natalie gets mugged at a subway station and suffers a head injury, she wakes up to find herself in a romantic comedy where everything is bright, colorful, wealthy, and PG-13. To wake herself up, Natalie figures that she has to make her hunky boss Blake ( Liam Hemsworth ) fall in love with her while going through all the motions of a typical romantic comedy.

For those who aren’t familiar with how rom-coms work, there’s a bit of a shoehorned in scene in the first act where Natalie goes on a rant against rom-coms so that audiences who aren’t aware of the genre’s conventions and flaws will be on the same page when those problems appear in Natalie’s rom-com world. Although the explanation scene is a bit clumsy in its execution, it at least lays out why Natalie finds the genre so infuriating. That makes her the perfect protagonist to go through a romantic comedy and pick through its imperfections and predictability while still going through the standard plot beats of the genre. The film is never so heavy on references that you feel like it’s a straight parody, but never so married to genre conventions that it loses its own personality.

What Strauss-Schulson does with Isn’t It Romantic isn’t too dissimilar to what his charming 2015 movie The Final Girls did with slashers. You can’t make a movie like Isn’t It Romantic and The Final Girls that literally lives in these movies without having an appreciation for the genre. Isn’t It Romantic isn’t a parody. It’s not like David Wain’s 2014 film They Came Together , which is far more biting and acerbic in its evaluation of the rom-com. At its core, Isn’t It Romantic is a really sweet movie that tries to upend the romantic comedy not to bring it down, but to see if there’s a better way to use its conventions. Can the gay best friend be a human being instead of just a servant to a heterosexual woman? Can the lead character want more than just the love of a man? Isn’t It Romantic pokes fun at all the trappings of the rom-com, but it’s deeply concerned with what the subtext of the story does and how it functions.

Wilson makes for a game lead who knows to have fun with the conceit while also being sharp enough to puncture the more irritating parts of the romantic comedy. It’s hard to think of other comic actresses who would be able to do this role as Wilson because, by her own admission, someone of her physique rarely gets to lead these movies. However, it’s her comic talent and presence that really makes the role work. If you had an actress who typically was cast in these kind of movies (assuming these movies really existed as they did back in the 80s and 90s), it would feel like the film was pulling its punch. With Wilson in the lead, Isn’t It Romantic gets to have its cake and eat it too, getting an affable romantic lead who still has the comic punch take the genre down a peg when needed.

I had a wonderful time with Isn’t It Romantic , and as a lover of rom-coms, I never felt like the movie was trying to hold itself above the genre as much as it was deconstructing it a bit for some laughs and to try and move the ball forward on some of its shortcomings. I don’t know how the film will work if you’re not a fan of romantic comedies, but I found it to be delightful and charming as a good rom-com should be.

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‘Isn’t It Romantic’ Review: Rebel Wilson Mocks, and Obeys, Rom-Com Rules

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By Ben Kenigsberg

• Feb. 12, 2019

“Isn’t It Romantic” is the second comedy in less than a week, after “What Men Want,” in which a woman gains the power to improve her life following a concussion.

Natalie (Rebel Wilson), an architect whose colleagues treat her as a doormat, disdains romance and hates it in movies. Her appearance is played for laughs. (A halal vendor implores her to stop his runaway cart with her body.) Then, in the process of foiling a mugger, she smacks into a metal beam in a subway station and wakes up to find herself in a romantic-comedy version of New York, filled with clean air, flowers and cupcakes.

She has a meet-cute with a Hemsworth (Liam). Her dog is suddenly obedient. Her newly capacious apartment looks like the 21st-century equivalent of a Doris Day pad. (The title’s nod to Rodgers and Hart notwithstanding, “Isn’t It Romantic” mostly operates on the assumption that rom-coms were invented in 1990 with “Pretty Woman.”) And her mousy best friend, Josh (Adam Devine), who was always encouraging her to be confident, has his own meet-cute with a woman who is both a yoga ambassador and swimsuit model (Priyanka Chopra).

In short, the movie invites the screenwriters — Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox and Katie Silberman — to do their worst, cliché-wise, and then to mock themselves. Some of the parody lands, such as a running joke about how Natalie is trapped in a PG-13 world, where her foul language is dependably bleeped out by street traffic and prim edits elide her efforts to have sex.

The director, Todd Strauss-Schulson, who had a way with projectile gags in “A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas,” keeps things visually lively whenever the film turns into a stealth musical. (“How did everyone know the choreography?” Natalie asks Josh after a bar crowd joins in her killer karaoke rendition of Whitney Houston.)

Wilson, leaning on her comic persona to compensate for the script’s lack of wit or inventiveness, is a reliable deadpanner. Her one-liners — calling the alternate universe she’s trapped in “‘The Matrix’ for lonely women,” for example — are funny enough to carry this featherweight movie as far as it can go, which isn’t far. The film’s reliance on conventions even as it snickers at them gives it the faint air of a con.

“Isn’t It Romantic” is designed to leave viewers feeling lightheaded and forgetful. That dizzy sensation could be love — or a mild head injury.

Isn’t It Romantic Rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned). Isn’t that meta. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes.

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Film Review: Rebel Wilson in ‘Isn’t It Romantic’

Rebel Wilson may not look like your typical romantic comedy lead, but she fits the formula just fine in this so-so meta-send-up of the genre.

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As a pseudo-reluctant example of yet another formulaic romantic comedy, “Isn’t It Romantic” features fewer montages than you might expect, but there’s one right about the first-act turning point in which jaded New York architect Natalie ( Rebel Wilson ) lays out all the reasons she hates movies like “The Wedding Singer” and “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” Oh, to see the full three-hour version of that screed, fleshed out with a PowerPoint presentation or performed as a one-woman Off Broadway show — now that would be a subversive answer to the genre!

What Natalie doesn’t realize is that she’s trapped in a middling romantic comedy of her own, and that her rant is really just the movie’s way of signaling what it plans to parody over the next hour or so. Frankly, it’s high time someone did for the meet-cute movie what “Scream” did for slasher films — which is to say, poked some postmodern fun at a genre we know by heart, calling out all kinds of tropes, from the heroine’s inexplicably unemployed gay best friend (Brandon Scott Jones, too much) to her impossibly posh New York apartment. But in this case, complaining about such devices serves as a kind of ironic shield from the very sincerity that makes such movies work in the first place.

Natalie — who actively defies these clichés by living in a dingy hovel next door to a drug dealer in one of New York’s outer boroughs — may say she hates romantic comedies, but she seems to have seen ’em all. The film’s opening scene catches her 10-year-old self sitting with her nose practically pressed to the TV screen watching “Pretty Woman,” the way Abigail Breslin studies a VHS recording of the Miss America pageant at the outset of “Little Miss Sunshine.” Both those movies acknowledge that the broadcasts in question are hardly appropriate aspirational material for young girls (“Pretty Woman,” for one, is an R-rated fantasy about a prostitute who meets her Prince Charming) before going on to present their equally stylized ideas of how things are for an unconventional leading lady in the “real world.”

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By any measure, Rebel Wilson is a natural comedic talent and a star, which should have been clear to anyone who watched her “Fat Amy” character steal the show from size-4 Anna Kendrick in the “Pitch Perfect” series. Wilson was of course wrong about breaking ground as the “first-ever plus-sized girl to be the star of a romantic comedy” (a claim that has since put her on the defensive on Twitter), but she’s right to recognize that Hollywood seldom casts actresses who look like her at the center of films like this. And guess what: It’s way more fun rooting for Rebel than it is pretending to care whether a more cookie-cutter actress will get the guy.

That’s the undeniable appeal of screenwriter Erin Cardillo’s comedic premise, fleshed out by fellow romantic comedy scribes Dana Fox (“The Wedding Date”) and Katie Silberman (“Set It Up”), only to be rather woodenly directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson (“A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas”): As a child, Natalie is told by her boxed-wine-drinking mother (“Absolutely Fabulous” star Jennifer Saunders), “They don’t make movies about girls like us.” And so, her character’s slow to realize that she happens to be the center of one, all but ignoring Josh ( Adam Devine ), the workplace best friend who’s obviously her soul mate — until a concussion turns Natalie’s life into a kind of exaggerated farce.

The next thing Natalie knows, the dreamy emergency room doctor (Tom Ellis) is getting lost in her eyes, and our newly clumsy heroine instantly charms everyone she bumps into in Central Park. Stepping into the street, she’s nearly hit by a limousine, out of which leaps her architecture firm’s playboy client Blake (Liam Hemsworth, whose Australian origins, like Wilson’s, are barely acknowledged), smitten by her “beguiling” personality. And Josh, who’s never had a girlfriend, suddenly finds himself on the fast track to marrying a swimsuit model (Priyanka Chopra) whom he saves from choking.

Such things happen in silly Hollywood movies, this even sillier send-up argues, although it’s infinitely more fun to suspend our disbelief and get swept up in the fantasy than it is to scrutinize how ridiculous these conventions are. While there’s virtually no risk that “Isn’t It Romantic” will make you love your favorite rom-coms any less, Strauss-Schulson hasn’t figured out how to have his cake and eat it too — to look down on the very confection he’s so busy peddling. Meanwhile, the script isn’t subversive enough to puncture the genre’s more problematic aspects, offering drive-by critiques of the patriarchy and the institution of marriage, only to pass off a fortune-cookie “love yourself” lesson as the solution to attracting the romance every gal deserves.

Best-case scenario, “Isn’t It Romantic” would have been the reverse of “Enchanted,” wherein a Disney princess tried to adapt to the harsh reality of New York City — only here, a hardened cynic tries to wrap her head around a flash-sanitized version of the Big Apple, where someone has magically erased Manhattan’s distinctive rotting-garbage stench, and replaced the liquor stores and check-cashing joints in her neighborhood with cupcake cafés and bridal shops. Though the premise differs from last year’s “I Feel Pretty,” the tone will feel familiar to those who caught Amy Schumer’s body-image comedy — and again, we’re left with the depressing realization that it somehow constitutes a radical act in Hollywood to feature shapely women as romantic comedy leads.

It’s not the most promising sign when one of the first things to happen to Natalie when she leaves her apartment is being broadsided by a runaway halal food cart (technically, that should have landed her in the hospital and triggered the rom-com delusions 15 minutes earlier), though Wilson intuitively understands how to leverage her body type as a comedic asset — as in the way she plays the climactic slow-motion running scene, listed earlier as one of the clichés we can look forward to watching the movie dismantle. Wilson’s high-wattage appeal shines brightest a few minutes earlier during a showstopping “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” karaoke scene that’s so well staged and edited, it feels like another director stepped in to orchestrate this set-piece.

The rest of the movie plays out more or less according to formula, peppered with references to far better movies. But “Isn’t It Romantic” recognizes one essential rule of the genre: However predictable the overall outcome, audiences want to be surprised by the details along the way. Here, that’s not so much whom Natalie will end up with as what it will take to snap her out of her delusion — where the delusion isn’t how cutesy her life has become all of a sudden, but the notion that she was ever undeserving of love.

Reviewed at The Theatre at Ace Hotel, Los Angeles, Jan. 11, 2019. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 88 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. release of a New Line presentation, in association with Bron Creative, of a Broken Road, Little Engine production. Producers: Todd Garner, Gina Matthews, Grant Scharbo, Rebel Wilson. Executive producers: Jason Cloth, Marty P. Ewing, Aaron L. Gilbert.
• Crew: Director: Todd Strauss-Schulson. Screenplay: Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox, Katie Silberman; story: Cardillo. Camera (color, widescreen): Simon Duggan. Editor: Andrew Marcus. Music: John Debney.
• With: Rebel Wilson, Adam Devine, Liam Hemsworth , Priyanka Chopra, Brandon Scott Jones, Jennifer Saunders, Tom Ellis, Betty Gilpin.

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Isn’t It Romantic Is the Inception of Rom-Coms (…Sort Of)

I think I literally said these exact same words the last time someone released a romantic-comedy spoof, but here goes again: The world certainly doesn’t need another romantic-comedy spoof. It’s the easiest of targets, so much so that some of the genre’s classics already have a gently parodic quality. (Think: My Best Friend’s Wedding , or There’s Something About Mary , or The 40-Year-Old Virgin .) And we’ve already had several clever spoof attempts — albeit relatively under-seen ones — such as the surreal They Came Together , and the acerbic The Baxter. Besides, why kick the rom-com when it’s down? It has been in steady decline ever since its 1990s heyday, and now seems on the verge of extinction; to point out its clichés and reveal its hypocrisies today feels like an exercise in obviousness.

But all that also gets at the charm of Isn’t It Romantic , which nestles a playfully meta rom-com satire inside what appears to be another rom-com, and in its deconstruction of the genre hides the suggestion that, maybe, such movies still have their place. It’s the Inception of rom-coms. Sort of.

Rebel Wilson’s protagonist Natalie in this sense could be a stand-in for the film itself, a born romantic who uses cynicism as a form of avoidance. We see her in the opening scene as an awkward, plus-sized teen (played by Alexandra Kis) back in Australia, enthralled by Pretty Woman on TV, while her beer-swilling mom snipes at her to forget any delusional fantasies about finding true love. If someone like her showed up in a movie like that, mom tells the wide-eyed Natalie, “they’d have to sprinkle Prozac on the popcorn. People would kill themselves.”

Fast-forward to the present, and Natalie has become a mid-level architect at a big firm who gets easily pushed around, has little to no ambition, and (surprise!) even less self-esteem. In other words: She is a classic romantic-comedy heroine — even before she finds herself literally trapped in one.

That surreal, high-concept development occurs after Natalie is mugged on the subway, and, in true klutzy rom-com protagonist fashion, accidentally slams her head into a column in the station. Suddenly, she finds herself enthralling all sorts of hunky men — including Blake (Liam Hemsworth), her firm’s strapping, billionaire client, who had previously thought that she was just a coffee girl. (In a subtle sign that the movie secretly is the thing it appears to be pretending to be, this supposedly fantasy version of Blake has an Australian accent, which is of course Hemsworth’s own accent.)

Despite all the telltale signs, it does take a while for Natalie to realize what’s happening to her: She has to first notice that “New York doesn’t smell like shit anymore”; that her crowded, scuzzy neighborhood is now festooned with bridal shops, bakeries, and independent bookstores; that her surly neighbor has become her flamboyantly gay best friend; and that her kindly cubicle-mate Whitney (Betty Gilpin) is now her bitchy, be-stilettoed office rival. Only then does a furious Natalie finally scream out, “I’m trapped inside a f**king romantic comedy!” Also, she can’t say “fuck” anymore, so when she utters that word, a truck suddenly starts to back up near her. “F**king PG-13!” she then yells. ( Isn’t It Romantic , in case you were wondering, is PG-13.)

Wilson can be an acerbic presence on screen — a little too quick and prolific with put-downs and one-liners that never quite sound as sharp as they should be — but here, the actress nicely balances Natalie’s submerged sweetness with her ongoing bewilderment and outrage at her predicament. She hates this too-sweet, pastel-colored world she’s stuck in — she can’t curse, she can’t have sex, and, curiously, she seems lonelier than ever — but she soon realizes that the only way out is to embrace her role in it. A male friend from work who might have secretly been in love with her all along is getting married, and she has to stop the wedding. It helps, of course, that our heroine actually has an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre — and that she has longings of her own toward this friend.

Isn’t It Romantic has plenty of fun toying with various familiar elements and sensibilities, but its deconstructions also feel like resurrections. There’s something comforting about such banalities, especially in an age when rom-coms aren’t crowding our screens anymore, and the love the movie has for its target can be seen in the confidence with which director Todd Strauss-Schulson deploys the clichés: the impromptu sing-alongs (that turn into full-on musical numbers) and the limo rides and the trips to the Hamptons. Like a gorgeous suitor about whom we may still have lingering doubts, the film wants to win us over. And while Isn’t It Romantic is unlikely to bring such movies back from the dead, in its have-it-both-ways attempt to simultaneously undermine and indulge the romantic comedy ethos, it reminds us of why they existed in the first place.

Why Are Leads in Rom-Coms Always Chasing After Someone?

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• Warner Bros.

Summary New York City architect Natalie works hard to get noticed at her job but is more likely to be asked to deliver coffee and bagels than to design the city’s next skyscraper. And if things weren’t bad enough, Natalie, a lifelong cynic when it comes to love, has an encounter with a mugger that renders her unconscious, waking to discover tha ... Read More

Directed By : Todd Strauss-Schulson

Written By : Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox, Katie Silberman

Isn't It Romantic

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Rebel Wilson

Liam Hemsworth

Adam Devine

Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Betty Gilpin

Brandon scott jones.

Jennifer Saunders

Natalie's mom, 12 year old natalie.

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Rao rampilla, food cart man, marcus choi, hugh sheridan, luciano acuna jr., raymond anthony thomas, zach cherry, sandy honig, rosemary howard, ron nakahara, shyrley rodriguez, critic reviews.

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‘Isn’t It Romantic’ Review: Rebel Wilson vs. the Rom-com — Guess Who Wins?

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Natalie ( Rebel Wilson ), an Aussie architect working in Manhattan, hates rom-coms. She’s allergic to all the clichés of the genre, and ever since she was a  child, her mom (Jennifer Saunders) has taught her that Hollywood fantasies with Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, etc. are “not for girls like us.” Working in New York does nothing to disabuse Natalie of the notion. She’s “extra-invisible” to her company’s handsome client, Blake ( Liam Hemsworth ), who Natalie describes as “CW hot.” He rudely treats her as a lowly assistant and barks orders for coffee. Meanwhile, she is adored by nebbish co-worker Josh (Adam DeVine), but she doesn’t notice. Work is her only passion.

Then, boom, everything changes. While chasing a mugger in the subway, Natalie smashes into a pole. Newly concussed, she wakes up in a New York with a glossy PG-13 filter on it. Cinematographer Simon Duggan’s camera shoots everything pastel-bright like a Martha Stewart catalogue, notably Natalie’s transformed apartment which is now magazine-spread ready. When Natalie runs into Blake again, he’s super polite, sporting an Aussie accent (both leads are real-life Australians) and calling her “beguiling” like a lovestruck Romeo. (Somewhere along the line, The Hunger Games hunk has found a light-comic touch that truly is beguiling.) Yes, the switcheroo gimmick in the script by Erin Cardillo, Dana Fox and Katie Silberman bears more than a passing resemblance to last year’s Amy Schumer comedy I Feel Pretty. Remarkably, the actors and director Todd Strauss-Schulson ( The Final Girls ) power on like the conked-head gimmick is a completely new invention.

Audiences may find it harder to fake amnesia, especially when Isn’t It Romantic starts morphing into the exact kind of sugar-spun rom-com that Natalie claims to despise. In fact, everyone starts acting like they’ve been forced fed Love Potion No. 9. Natalie acquires a gay best friend in Donny (Brandon Scott Jones), the better to deal with Whitney (a terrific Betty Gilpin), her mousey work assistant who is now a glam go-getter practically cloned from Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. Even Josh gets hit on by gorgeous Priyanka Chopra Jonas (the third name courtesy of new husband Nick) as Isabella, a beauty with the unlikely title of “yoga ambassador.” Natalie is ready to puke, until she hops into bed with body-beautiful Blake. The catch: There’s no sex. It’s all before-and-after fade-outs, because it has to be. Natalie is fated for Josh, a non-spoiler unless you’ve never been allowed to see a Hollywood love story.

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Wilson makes it all go down easy with her brass and sass and unfakeable warmth even during the danceathon ending in which the whole cast celebrates the rom-com aesthetic by getting down to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” Isn’t that a betrayal of everything Natalie and her movie are supposed to stand for? Yeah, maybe, but this meta-take on meet-cutes hooks you up with a few good laughs while it mocks itself. It’s a damn shame about the sucker punch of a happy ending. Still, thanks to the comic tornado at its center, Isn’t It Romantic is still your best bet for a Valentine’s date at the movies. You could do worse.

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Screen Rant

Isn't it romantic review: a hilarious sendup of romantic comedies.

Isn't It Romantic is a wild and hilarious meta journey inside a romantic comedy, poking fun at the genre's tropes while embracing its message of love.

Isn't It Romantic is a wild and hilarious meta journey inside a romantic comedy, poking fun at the genre's tropes while embracing its message of love.

In the current moment of Hollywood, the romantic comedy is experiencing somewhat of a revival. Thanks to a 2018 that featured the big screen success of Crazy Rich Asians and the buzzworthy Netflix films To All the Boys I've Loved Before and Set It Up , rom-coms are staging a comeback among mainstream releases after being relegated to the realms of made-for-TV movies and indies. It's only appropriate then that Warner Bros. should release Isn't It Romantic , an affectionate parody of the genre as a whole, particularly the romantic comedies of the '80s and '90s with their idealized worlds. After all, what happens when girls who grew up on a steady diet of rom-coms learn that life doesn't really have a happily ever after? Isn't It Romantic is a wild and hilarious meta journey inside a romantic comedy, poking fun at the genre's tropes while embracing its message of love.

Isn't It Romantic follows Natalie (Rebel Wilson), an Australian architect living in New York City who has detested romantic comedies since her mother (Jennifer Saunders) forced her to look at the films through a cynical lens. In her adult life, Natalie is a closed-off person who doesn't assert herself in important situations at her job, like presenting her idea for the parking garage for the hotel her firm is designing. However, after going on a long diatribe about the evils of rom-coms to her assistant Whitney (Betty Gilpin) and her best friend Josh (Adam DeVine), Natalie is mugged on the subway and knocked unconscious, waking up in the surreal, idealized world of a romantic comedy.

In this world, Natalie's small apartment is upgraded to a massive (by New York standards) studio, her office looks like a young and fun start-up, Whitney is her mortal work enemy and the client, Blake (Liam Hemsworth), not only notices her, but finds her to be very "beguiling." Though Josh seems to be the same, Natalie doesn't get much help from him in figuring out how to escape the PG-13 rom-com universe since he soon gets swept up in his own romance with swimsuit model Isabella (Priyanka Chopra). Instead, Natalie must resort to her own Gay Best Friend, Donny (Brandon Scott Jones), in order to help her make Blake fall in love with her in a bid to escape this rom-com world. However, getting back to her normal life isn't quite as easy as Natalie believed, and she'll have to learn certain lessons about love before she can escape this romantic comedy.

Isn't It Romantic is directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson ( The Final Girls ) and written by Erin Cardillo ( Life Sentence, Significant Mother ), Dana Fox ( How to Be Single ) and Katie Silberman ( Set It Up ) from a story by Cardillo. Cardillo, Fox and Silberman have a great deal of experience working on (both film and TV) rom-coms between the three of them, and they have an obvious love for the classics of the genre, referencing scenes from the likes of When Harry Met Sally to more general tropes like the Gay Best Friend or the pivotal wedding scene. For his part, Strauss-Schulson has experience is exploring the idealized world of a movie genre, having directed The Final Girls , which takes on the tropes of slasher horror movies in a similar manner. In Isn't It Romantic , Strauss-Schulson applies a similar visual sensibility to differentiate the styles of the real and rom-com worlds, helping to bring this oddball movie premise to life and accentuate the story's themes.

The story of Isn't It Romantic both deconstructs the conventions of rom-coms and acts as a send-up to the genre as a whole, providing a new spin on the format. Although the movie follows a woman who ostensibly hates romantic comedies and wants to make a case for why they aren't true to life, Isn't It Romantic is clearly for lovers of the genre - but those who have grown up and realized how hyper-idealized the version of love and romance is as depicted in those films from the '80s and '90s. Isn't It Romantic is still a romantic comedy, but one that builds on the genre's legacy and offers a modern message about love. Perhaps the most modern and unconventional aspect of Isn't It Romantic is the film's exploration of different kinds of love, not just romantic, but platonic and self-love. Isn't It Romantic makes the bold assertion (for a rom-com, anyway) that romantic love isn't the most important kind of love, and can actually be secondary to what will truly make someone happy.

Of course, that story wouldn't be nearly as successful if not for the performance of the film's lead, and Wilson excellently walks the fine line between unrelatable cynic and rom-com heroine. She provides a compelling foil to the idealized conventions of romantic comedies as the everyman (or, everywoman) character who's thrust into a surrealistic world that she must explore and escape. Further, Wilson's co-stars, Hemsworth and DeVine, are compelling male romantic leads in their own ways. Hemsworth embodies the aloof businessman and alluring overly-romantic admirer, while DeVine brings his typical humorous charm to a more realistic character. The rest of the supporting cast is rounded out well by Gilpin, Chopra and Scott, who play more stock characters to complement the core trio.

Still, perhaps the biggest strength of Isn't It Romantic is that it's clear everyone involved in the project has a love of rom-coms. It's not a takedown of romantic comedies, but a thoughtful critique of what the genre teaches young girls while offering a more empowering (and realistic) message. Given the genre's storied history, Isn't It Romantic likely could have gone a little deeper into its deconstruction of rom-com tropes and conventions, but the film uses its brisk, just short of 90-minutes runtime well enough. Altogether, though, Isn't It Romantic fits perfectly into the recent rom-com revival, offering a slightly different perspective as it plays with convention, but still adhering to the heart of the genre, which are themes of love and fulfillment.

As a result, Isn't It Romantic is perfect for romantic comedy lovers, particularly those who watched the classics growing up. It's perhaps a bold move to release an atypical rom-com just before Valentine's Day, but Isn't It Romantic will likely be just as fun of a watch for couples as for singles and groups of friends. It's a movie for movie lovers and a rom-com for rom-com lovers, so it's only appropriate that it releases just before a holiday dedicated to love. Ultimately, Isn't It Romantic is a fun and modern romantic comedy that continues the genre's revival with an altogether delightful sendup to its tropes and conventions while staying true to what's most important - the film's message of love.

Isn't It Romantic  is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 88 minutes long and rated PG-13 for language, some sexual material, and a brief drug reference.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

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Isn't it romantic.

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Isn’t It Romantic (2019)

March 1, 2019 by Liam Hoofe

Isn’t it Romantic , 2019.

Directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson. Starring Rebel Wilson, Liam Hemsworth, Adam Devine, and Priyanka Chopra.

A woman who despises romantic comedies suddenly finds herself trapped in one after suffering a concussion and must find her way back to the real world by falling in love.

In Isn’t it Romantic , Rebel Wilson plays Natalie, a New York woman who has grown up being told that she will never belong in a romantic comedy. In the movie’s opening scene, we see her mother telling her that movies like Pretty Woman are an unachievable fantasy for girls like her and that she should accept her fate and get on with it. Fast forward two decades and Natalie is working as an aspiring architect who is overlooked by every male around her, that is, until she bangs her head, gets a concussion and wakes up right in the middle of a romantic comedy.

Trapped in a world that feels as though it was designed by Michael the architect from The Good Place specifically designed to torture her, Natalie must work her way through all of the rom-com tropes to find her way back to her reality.

As high concept comedies go, Isn’t it Romantic is certainly one of Netflix’s more enjoyable recent outings. Rebel Wilson is perfectly cast in the lead role and she delivers what is, for the most part, a witty and enjoyable performance with a suitable amount of gusto. In fact, this is where the majority of the movie’s strengths lie- in its humour. The riffs on rom-com tropes aren’t exactly subtle, but they manage to deliver a few laughs, while the film is peppered with plenty of background visual gags that are definitely worth checking out.

The film even manages to get the best out of Adam Devine, whose previous record with Netflix productions is hardly flattering.

As is so often the case though,  the movie’s plot does eventually end up becoming the exact thing it’s satirising, going for the most predictable ending that does take a little bit away from the movie as it comes to its conclusion. The list of characters, including the gay sidekick, the lovable and nerdy best friend, the perfect woman and the hunky and kind love interest are all fun to watch, however, and for the most part, the cast delivers in terms of performances.

Arguably the strongest part of the film, though, is the message that it will send out to younger women about loving themselves. Netflix has thrived off this in recent months, with other movies like Dumplin and Sierra Burgess is a Loser both riffing on similar themes.

While it does commit the sin of becoming the exact thing it is trying to satirise, Isn’t it Romantic still has enough great gags to keep it entertaining for its fairly short run-time, while Rebel Wilson also manages to provide the movie with plenty of laughs.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

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• DVD & Streaming

Isn’t It Romantic

• Comedy , Romance

Content Caution

In Theaters

• February 13, 2019
• Rebel Wilson as Natalie; Priyanka Chopra as Isabella; Liam Hemsworth as Blake; Betty Gilpin as Whitney; Adam Devine as Josh; Brandon Scott Jones as Donny

Home Release Date

• May 21, 2019
• Todd Strauss-Schulson

Distributor

• Warner Bros.

Movie Review

Don’t you just love love?

The endless flowers. The bold, romantic gestures. The late-night strolls through a perfect—wait. What?

That’s not love. At least, it’s not the kind Natalie is going to fall for. Having grown up with a cynical mother who was quick to destroy such flighty notions, Natalie is currently in “romantic comedy rehab.”

Sure, she used to swoon over those dreamy boys on the screen. But she’s come to realize that real life is nothing like the movies. And love, well, if it exists, it’s definitely not in the cards for her.

But those jaded attitudes are nothing that slamming headfirst into a pole and falling into a coma can’t fix.

And when Natalie wakes up, she realizes she’s been transported into her nightmare: a real-life romantic comedy. The flowers are bright, New York constantly smells like lavender, and guys see her. Like, they actually recognize she exists.

Well, her best friend, Josh, has always recognized her. But he’s just a friend. Right? And who cares about Josh when she has a drop-dead gorgeous millionaire by her side?

It all seems perfect.

But every romantic comedy has a twist, right. So here’s the one Natalie faces: If she wants to get out of the gushy story she’s now trapped in, she’s going to have to learn what “true love” really means.

Positive Elements

For all of Natalie’s flaws and insecurities, she’s still a kind-hearted woman at her core. She serves others without complaint (though sometimes at her own expense); she’s mindful of others’ needs; and she’s intelligent and creative. Eventually, she learns to love herself and to enforce healthy boundaries.

Natalie’s best friend, Josh, is sweet and thoughtful. He constantly encourages Natalie to recognize her true gifts and talents, and to realize that she is beautiful and talented. And even when he’s discouraged, Josh looks out for Natalie.

Other good messages here include learning to express your feelings in healthy ways, believing in yourself, embracing positive self-talk and fostering relationships that go beyond the surface.

Elsewhere, friends try to encourage Natalie when needed. And a man rescues a choking woman.

Spiritual Elements

A guy says he’d like to turn water into wine, just like Jesus. We also hear passing references to Buddhism and a palm reader.

Sexual Content

Natalie is seen in bed (completely clothed), presumably after having sex. She attempts to lure the guy she’s with back into bed multiple times, because she can’t remember doing anything. But each attempt then flashes to the next morning. Natalie is frustrated by the process before she realizes that she keeps skipping through the details of these sex scenes because she’s trapped in a “PG-13 movie.”

As a young girl, Natalie watches the movie Pretty Woman , specifically the scene where Julia Roberts’ prostitute character is in a bathtub (though covered by bubbles). While running, Natalie grabs her breasts for support.

Men and women hug, kiss, flirt, make out and comment on one another’s physical appearance. Multiple jokes verbally reference sex (both homosexual and heterosexual), “coming out,” nudity, fertility procedures, male genitalia, sexually transmitted diseases and bodily fluids. A man pretends to have an orgasm while eating (recalling a similar scene from the rom-com When Harry Met Sally ).

Two men are shown kissing (once in person, as well as on a billboard). A woman sends her friend a sexually suggestive GIF. Women wear revealing outfits and cleavage-baring tops. A poster of a swimsuit model hangs in an office. Men are seen shirtless, and one man is wrapped in nothing but a towel.

Violent Content

A man attempts to mug Natalie. She’s thrown to the ground and hits her head on a pole. (She later wonders if she’s died.) A woman gets into a car crash. A man is punched in the crotch. A woman attempts to stop a food cart with her body. Someone trips and falls multiple times. One character rips off a bandage, causing blood to squirt onto a doctor’s face. A guy pretends to shoot someone with an air gun.

Crude or Profane Language

God’s name is misused more than 20 times, occasionally paired with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused once. The f-word is bleeped out more than 10 times; we hear it fully pronounced once. The s-word is used about 10 times. Other profanity includes multiple uses of “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—” and “crap.” A woman tells a man to “p-ss off.” Name-calling includes “whore” and “idiot.” We hear a slang reference to the male anatomy. Characters use crude hand gestures.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Natalie lives next door to a drug dealer who, we hear, helps many visitors in search of marijuana. Men and women consume beer, wine and champagne, and take shots of hard liquor. A woman jokes about someone using Prozac.

Other Negative Elements

As a young child, Natalie’s mother discouraged her from watching romantic movies, telling her that women “like them” would never have a happy ending. Because of that formative influence, Natalie has extremely low self-esteem, and she doesn’t realize how much many people value who she is. Before hitting her head, she is a pushover, a pessimist and a cynic who believes herself to be functionally invisible to almost everyone in her world.

A man steals something valuable from his girlfriend. A woman is rude to a colleague. Another woman tries to ruin her friend’s wedding. A couple jokes about getting arrested after they break into an ice cream shop.

A dog defecates on a rug. A man belches. Someone cracks a joke about muscular dystrophy. We see two women on toilets (from the shoulders up).

Have you ever heard someone say that you can’t love others well until you learn to love yourself? Isn’t It Romantic unpacks that idea through Natalie’s story.

Natalie has struggled to understand what love really means for her entire life. As a young girl, she filled her head with dreams of the fairy-tale variety she saw on the big screen. And she would have believed it, had her mother not told her that “girls like us” never find love like that.

But it wasn’t just those discouraging words that filled Natalie with cynicism. It was her perception that she could never deserve love.

What a lie. We have all been created by the Author of love to give and receive love freely. But that can be a difficult concept to grasp—especially when influences such as the ones Natalie has had tempt us to harden and close off our hearts.

Isn’t It Romantic tries to get at some important messages about love. We hear, for instance, “There’s no being more worthy of love than yourself.” That’s something we all need to be reminded of from time to time. Unfortunately, this satirical rom-com’s occasional redemptive moments are frequently undermined by its raunchy ones.

Kristin Smith

Kristin Smith joined the Plugged In team in 2017. Formerly a Spanish and English teacher, Kristin loves reading literature and eating authentic Mexican tacos. She and her husband, Eddy, love raising their children Judah and Selah. Kristin also has a deep affection for coffee, music, her dog (Cali) and cat (Aslan).

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Isn't It Romantic? Reviews

Full Review | Oct 29, 2020

The presence of such pleasant players as Veronica Lake and Mona Freeman, among others, fails to offset the heavy-handed horseplay of a trite and tedious filmusical.

There is little to recommend in this botched-up mixture of comedy, music, and drama.

Isn't It Romantic isn't. It's a seldom diverting mixture comedy and songs that misses.

A formless and rambling musical, which looks as though it were made with at least a half dozen previous musical successes in mind.

Action is lively, oldtime songs are well sung and the costumes and settings are above average.

A mild musical which doesn't quite come off.

Full Review | Jun 20, 2019

The idea is to give the wholesome nostalgias of small-town U.S. life a coat of sophisticated varnish and, if possible, a new lungful of life. As it turns out, the picture smells more of varnish than of fresh air.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2018

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The Story Behind the Shortest Movie Review of All Time

Does leonard maltin regret his one-word pan of the original isn’t it romantic in a word, no..

By the time it stopped publishing new editions in 2015 after 46 years , Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide had swelled to nearly 16,000 entries, each rated from four stars to “bomb” with generous cast listings, knowing bits of film history, and some memorable barbs. The fat volume’s disciples included scholars, nostalgists, trivia buffs, Turner Classic Movies addicts, and this onetime teenage movie fan, who still has a musty copy of a ’90s edition on his boyhood bookshelf. But there was one blurb amid the thousands that everyone seemed to know, whether or not they realized where it originated: a very short review for the little-remembered 1948 musical Isn’t It Romantic? It read simply:

Fans of Maltin’s movie bible or of landmark moments in film criticism may have found the review ringing in their ears this month, as the Rebel Wilson–led romantic comedy Isn’t It Romantic marched toward theaters. (The new movie is unrelated.) Even in the pre-internet days, the pithy review became such a cult favorite that a fan, in the 1980s, submitted it to Guinness World Records, which later informed Maltin it would certify it as the world’s shortest movie review.

Asked by phone this week, several decades later, if people still bring up the review to him, Maltin replied quickly, “Yes. Yes they do.” But he said he’s always enjoyed the appreciation, even if it wasn’t his most searching work. “I remember writing it,” he said. “I guess I was in a smart-alecky mood that day.

“This was in the early days of the guide, when we were, in one fell swoop, practicing reviews of hundreds, indeed, thousands of movies,” he added. “We were trying to find interesting, colorful, precise ways to describe a lot of formulaic movies, and there was an existing book before mine, and we were keenly aware of not even accidentally copying the way they had described those movies. If the plot of the ’40s murder mystery was ‘Man strangles his wife and tries to get away with it,’ how many ways can you say that? And our reviews were much, much shorter in the early guides. Much, much shorter.”

His concise evisceration of Isn’t It Romantic came to him quickly. “When this title of an utterly mediocre and inconsequential—not to say unmemorable—movie came along, it was hard to resist that review,” he said. Did he ever feel bad that his review had become more famous than the film itself—maybe, say, for the people involved in the production? “I daresay they may not have disagreed,” he said. “This is at Paramount in the days it was all Paramount contract players, and so they had no say as to whether they liked or disliked the material.”

Maltin, who still reviews movies in Los Angeles and now hosts the podcast Maltin on Movies , had not seen the new Isn’t It Romantic and could not confirm whether it also warranted a one-word takedown. (He’s heard good things.) But he noted that, as Movie Guide fans know, there was plenty more where that came from. He read one favorite blurb aloud on the phone, written by Mike Clark, a longtime critic, about the 1966 sci-fi horror flick The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (rating: bomb):

1) Look at the title. 2) Examine the cast. 3) Be aware that the plot involves omnivorous trees. 4) Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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‘isn’t it romantic’: what the critics are saying.

The first reviews have surfaced for 'Isn't it Romantic,' helmed by director Todd Strauss-Schulson and starring Rebel Wilson, Liam Hemsworth, Priyanka Chopra and Adam Devine.

By Trilby Beresford , Katie Kilkenny February 12, 2019 3:17pm

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The first reviews have surfaced for Isn’t it Romantic , helmed by director Todd Strauss-Schulson, and they appear to be lukewarm. 

Described as a satirical fantasy rom-com, the pic follows a young architect ( Rebel Wilson ) who finds herself mysteriously trapped in a romantic comedy. The film also stars Liam Hemsworth, Priyanka Chopra and Adam Devine. 

Isn’t it Romantic , which hits theaters Thursday, has received a modest reaction from critics. 

The Hollywood Reporter’s Sheri Linden calls the film’s concept “inspired,” but notes that the screenplay doesn’t really know what to do with it. “A meta engine drives the movie, more or less: It’s a romantic comedy examining, if not quite dismantling, the mechanics of the romantic comedy,” she writes. “For all its winking jabs, this blend of giddy bits and teachable moments eventually follows the same old playbook.”

Linden goes on to praise the cinematography and design, as well as the “vividly imagined fantasyland” that Strauss-Schulson created. Ultimately, she was disappointed in the familiar fairytale — however, the critic recognized that a “real person” is at the center of the story.

Kate Erbland from Indiewire   noted that the movie “keeps things light and smart,” never dipping into darkness or crass jokes.” She elaborates to say that the jokes come “fast and furious,” all in the time span of an ideal 90-minute run. Erbland writes that the screenplay leans into classic “genre tropes” that are suitable for the narrative.

Concluding her review, Erbland suggests that the pic’s final message is “a worthy lesson about love and respect, the kind that both movies and real life could stand to embrace more often.”

In The Guardian , Benjamin Lee writes that Isn’t it Romantic “avoids some earlier pitfalls of its spoofier predecessors,” and notes that a surprising element of the film is “just how much effort is put into the intricate new world.” Before Wilson reaches the rom-com world, the colors are “drab, muted and easily recognizable for anyone living in New York,” Lee writes, and once she enters the new landscape, everything is “extravagantly designed with bright, vibrant colors.” The critics claims that “there’s fun to be had here” and gives the movie three out of five stars.

The AV Club’s Kate Rife considered Wilson’s character depiction in her review: “Wison’s body type is an unspoken but essential element of the film’s humor — alas, there are a couple of fat jokes at the beginning — and its commentary on cinematic tropes. When she says ‘girls like me’ don’t get special treatment, we know exactly what she means.” Rife goes on to note that the rest of the cast fall into the “purely supporting character with no life of their own” category, though in this particular film, the critic recognizes that may have been intentional. 

In The New York Times , Ben Kenigsberg appreciated how gags kept Isn’t it Romantic “visually lively” and Wilson’s performance, but noted it wasn’t enough to save the movie. “Wilson, leaning on her comic persona to compensate for the script’s lack of wit or inventiveness, is a reliable deadpanner,” he writes. “Her one-liners — calling the alternate universe she’s trapped in ‘ The Matrix for lonely women,’ for example — are funny enough to carry this featherweight movie as far as it can go, which isn’t far.” He added that though the setup encourages the pic’s screenwriters to send up the worst in cliche, “The film’s reliance on conventions even as it snickers at them gives it the faint air of a con.”

The Chicago Tribune ‘s Michael Phillips withholds from critiquing the movie too harshly, though he suggests it could have gone farther with its comedy. “ Isn’t It Romantic  gets by, barely, on its apparently inexhaustible comic premise, and on Rebel Wilson’s stand-back-world-get-offa-my-runway comic chops,” he notes at the top of his review. Still, its “jokey treatise on the genre’s alluring lies is a 15-minute sketch, taffy-pulled out to 88 minutes,” Phillips writes. The critic is most eager to see the film take a different, more interesting direction than a half-critique of rom-coms. Of its occasional music numbers, Phillips writes, “[h]ad Isn’t It Romantic turned into a full-on musical, the contrivances and tired, vaguely patronizing messaging would’ve been easier to ignore.”

Over at Time Magazine , Stephanie Zacharek offered a positive take on Isn’t It Romantic , noting the tightrope the film walks between conveying the harsh, unromantic realities of New York and New York as it exists in romantic movies. “The picture is honest about human hopes and disappointments, even as it acknowledges—and offers—the pleasures of a good romantic comedy,” she writes. “Sometimes we may feel a little stupid for buying into, even just a little bit, the dreams they put onscreen for us. But who gets through life, or love, without ever feeling stupid?” Zacharek also praises Wilson’s performance, calling her a “terrific romantic-comedy hero.”

In t he Los Angeles Times , Katie Walsh, like others, argues that Isn’t It Romantic only goes halfway in its critique of rom-coms. The film does “tackle the representation of gay men, and the problematic idea that women in the workplace are often enemies in these movies,” she notes. “But it doesn’t get at some of the more problematic and frankly creepy behavior by leading men that’s been normalized in rom-coms. The two male leads are harmless here, but there are some missed opportunities to really deconstruct the genre.” Still, Walsh finds it “refreshing and radical” that ultimately Wilson’s heroine decides to love herself instead of a man, which she calls a “simple but revolutionary notion.”

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Movie Review: Isn’t It Romantic (2019)

• Natasha Alvar
• Movie Reviews
• --> May 4, 2019

Isn’t It Romantic is extremely self aware, breaking the fourth wall with more frequency than “Deadpool.” It knows the tropes that define the rom-com genre and the rules at play. Thus, there is a desire to establish itself as something different. The problem here is — it can’t. It functions on the complexity level of the grandfather paradox, where the more it tries to not be the usual romantic comedy, the more it satisfies the requirements of being one.

While there are unconventional elements to the movie, it is for the most part a conformist. Not only that, it feeds on nostalgia of the rom-coms that have come before it. “Pretty Woman” is used as part of the opening sequence and shows up in other segments of the movie as well, with bits of “When Harry Met Sally” and “13 Going On 30” dunked in for good measure. I know I should frown upon this preying on sentiment, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy this movie more than I should.

It has a decent protagonist in the form of the charmingly funny Rebel Wilson (“ Pitch Perfect 3 ”). Her character, Natalie, is a bit of a pushover, the nice one in the office who gets taken advantage of. She is a talented architect, but seems reluctant to showcase what she is capable of. She also has a strong dislike for romantic comedies and the lack of realism they possess. Her skepticism is so immense that she would rather believe that her co-worker/best friend Josh (Adam Devine, “ Why Him? ”) is gawking at a billboard featuring a hot woman than admit to herself that she could be the object of his affection.

This all changes when she suffers a head injury from a mugging gone wrong (though when has a mugging ever gone right), finding herself plunged into the world of a PG-13 rom-com. To leave the world, she needs to follow the obvious breadcrumbs to finding love at the end. It does seem to develop quite easily, because all the men in this new love doped-up world seem to find her irresistible and “beguiling.”

Here is where the gorgeous and wealthy Blake (Liam Hemsworth, “ Independence Day: Resurgence ”) makes his entrance. He sweeps Natalie away on romantic getaways and secluded moments of ice cream eating. However, anyone familiar with the territory of romantic comedies knows that Blake isn’t the one she ends up with — cue the best friend. Only there is the minor hiccup of said best friend getting dazzled by the lovely Yoga ambassador, Isabella (Priyanka Chopra, “ Baywatch ”).

Natalie finds herself in the same position that has plagued rom-com protagonists since the beginning of time, where she needs to stop the wedding and win the man by professing her feelings. However, because this is an anti-rom-com, there is of course a significant twist in the road. But before we even get to wedding crashing and epiphany having, the writing trio of Dana Fox, Erin Cardillo and Katie Silberman devise a good song and dance sequence to lighten the mood. It’s not particularly well choreographed, but the bulk of the cast, namely Wilson, Devine and Chopra, handle it well as they have starred in previous movies with singing and dancing.

Isn’t It Romantic isn’t quite as subversive as it claims to be. Sure the lead is an unconventional type of attractive, Devine might not be the looker Hemsworth is, but there is enough charm and investment for it to succeed as a romantic comedy. Has it done enough to be among the great rom-coms? I don’t think so — but it is still an entertaining ride. It is the escape I was searching for in a long work week, offering me the respite to laugh and be reminded of how wonderful the world can be — and that is the defining trait of a romantic comedy, after all.

Tagged: accident , architect , dating , relationships , woman

Natasha is an English Literature teacher. She believes that stories are the essence of being human, and loves sharing this world with her students. One day, she hopes to break into the literary world with an offering of her own, but for now, she finds enjoyment in writing plays for her students as well as penning content for The Critical Movie Critics. She also writes for moviebabblereviews.com in her spare time. You can follow her @litmysoul on Instagram, if you want.

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