This review may contain spoilers!
People We Meet On Vacation is an adaptation of the Emily Henry romance novel of the same name. In this film, Poppy and Alex kindle a friendship driving home from college to Linfield, Ohio. As they become close, they decide to make a pact to go on a vacation with one another every summer for the rest of their lives.
This is the sort of film that starts pretty well; there's a bit of intrigue about Poppy's past relationship with Alex, and we get a flashback of how they met. It's that early stage, when they seem to grate on one another before realising that they actually quite like the company of the other person and become friends in the motel room scene, when the film is strongest.
The current pop music soundtrack of this film really plants us in romance territory, but more than that, it makes our protagonists feel entirely wild and free. 'Forever Your Girl' by Paula Abdul is such a good anthem track for our two leading roles.
Molly Shannon and Alan Ruck, who played Wanda and Jimmy respectively, were some of the funniest characters in the film; the scene in which they are trying to talk to the two young leads about safe sex is one of the best in the feature.
However, the best performance came from Emily Bader, who played Poppy. I love it when a young performer sees the chance of leading a major film for the shot it is and really puts their everything into it. From the moment she hits the screen, you can tell Bader is really invested in telling this awkward travel blogger's story well. Poppy is a bit of a chaotic force to be reckoned with; her attention span is scattered, and she runs at a million miles a minute. The character isn't written to tell jokes, yet I found Bader to be an absolutely hilarious lead. Poppy is a character who has faced hardship and dedicated her life to running away from that moment in time. It's really interesting seeing how Bader pushes those tiny moments of feeling broken through. As a whole, this is also just such a fun leading character for a romance movie, and Bader does a good job of showing that moment where her character falls head over heels in love.
This is a film based on a BookTok book, the sort of trend-driven romance that relies on stuffing as many tropes into a read as possible. People We Meet On Vacation watches exactly like that. Poppy and Alex don't really like one another at first, we get a one-bed at the motel situation, the whole thing is unrequited love and friends to lovers. The film doesn't even try to hide the possibility that these two will wind up together; there's no mystique to any of it. But they do have to work unbearably hard to get there. For the most part, this is a film with two characters yearning for one another the whole time, while we deal with them being with other people or an engagement or their lifestyles being too different for one another. Even when the film finally pulls this couple together, it then shatters them apart so that we can have one more reunion scene. I also wasn't a very big fan of the structure of this feature. The fact that we had a modern-day setting where the character personalities yoyo-ed between their usual personalities to grave stoicism was bad enough. But the fact it became broken up with a constant series of flashbacks to every summer holiday between this couple would be jarring and obvious. The flow of the film always wound up feeling interrupted, while you had to listen to characters bluntly say to one another, "Norway was my favourite trip..." seconds before the flashback strikes. Poppy might be a travel writer, but her job seems to be more of an afterthought to the film to make it all work. I also struggled with the dialogue as the film went along, lines like "You're my vacation" coming at the audience by the end of the film felt like the writers just gave up.
The style of this film is nice in those establishing shots, postcard moments. But a movie can't just be pretty on the cover; it has to show a sense of style the whole ride through. People We Meet On Vacation makes some settings feel staged (as they are), places the camera in obvious spots and struggles with lighting problems throughout. I also found the editing of this film to be agonisingly dull; often, scenes had a habit of lingering too long on a shot or a narrative beat. The score for this film is probably the sort that could be applied to any Hallmark romance film; it lacks character and identity.
Tom Blyth, who played Alex, didn't really feel like a great lead for a romance feature; Blyth was often so expressionless and didn't pour enough emotional variance into a scene. Sarah Catherine Hook, Lucien Laviscount and Spencer Neville, who played Sarah, Trey and Julian respectively, failed to present anything resembling characters; these were the fictional exes that sort of held on tightly to the lead performers in a handful of scenes. Miles Heizer, Tommy Do and Ian Porter, who played David, Nam and Ed Nilsen respectively, were Blyth's onscreen family but added little to the film; even the moments where Porter and Blyth could have had an emotional connection failed to amount to anything. Jameela Jamil, who played Swapna, struggles to play roles very differently from one another; there was no part of this movie where I felt Jamil helmed a successful travel magazine or blog, nor did I feel she even resembled Bader's boss. Lukas Gage, who played Buck, is a bit of a novelty sexy character played for comedy; Gage feels more propped up to be laughed at than to actually play a part in this movie. Alice Lee, who played Rachel, is a friend type tossed to Bader early on and then promptly snatched away; Lee's place in this film feels like a rather unnecessary element.
A remarkably shallow streaming romance film that proves smushing corny dialogue and Booktok-level pining doesn't make for much of a story. I would give People We Meet On Vacation a 2/10.
