Directed by: Lance Hool
Starring: Jacob Elordi, Radha Mitchell, Adan Canto, Tiera Skovbye, Kari Matchett, Steve Bacic
I feel churlish writing negative reviews about a movie that means well. 2 Hearts wants to be loved, like a lost puppy or kitten. I take no delight in reporting my experience. This is a movie which may be too saccharine even for Lifetime or Hallmark. 2 Hearts has the depth of an infomerical, and the movie ultimately plays like one. We watch two stories of blissful love interrupted by a crisis we knew was coming, and it had to, because otherwise 2 Hearts would've just been the tale of these boring, inert romances.
The actors play people who are nice enough, and are forced to recite stilted dialogue to each other while we tap our foot impatiently waiting for something to happen. Something happens indeed, and instead of being emotionally involved, we are grateful the movie finally went somewhere. Anywhere. The opening scene shows Chris (Elordi) being rushed on a gurney to an operating room with his girlfriend Sam (Skovbye) right alongside him. Chris, in voice-over narration, blathers on about "life happening for you" instead of "to you", and then he begins the story of Jorge (Canto). Jorge as a teenager is stricken with a degenerative lung disease and doctors say he won't live past twenty. His father (Bacic) adds: "They said he wouldn't live past twelve,"
Jorge indeed lives to adulthood working for his family's lucrative rum business, and falls in love at first sight with Leslie (Mitchell), an attractive Pan Am flight attendant working a flight Jorge is on. When Leslie asks if there is anything she can do for Jorge, he says "hold my hand until we take off," She obliges and the two fall in love, meeting up in different cities and eventually marrying despite his father's obligatory objections to marrying someone while knowing he will die sooner than later. After this scene, the family objections are never raised again, mostly because they are so ludicrous on the surface. Don't they want their son, who has managed to outlive doctor's expectations while dealing with a potentially fatal condition, to be happy?
Chris' own love life shapes up in his freshman year at Loyola where he meets the comely Sam and wins her heart despite having an annoyingly hyper personality. His family seems to like her, (there is no mention or any scenes of her family), but then one day Chris falls into a coma with bleeding on the brain. In retrospect, it seems both Sam and Leslie have no families of their own. Their onscreen interactions are with their mates' families, and briefly at that. A calamity befalls Chris and we take up the story from his admission to the hospital.
2 Hearts toys with us with a Big Reveal that plays fair before moving on to what the movie is Really About. By the time Chris is languishing in a coma in the hospital, Jorge doesn't have long to live unless he can receive a lung transplant. The connection between Jorge and Chris, two men who never met, is revealed as promised in the trailers. Jorge ages in the thirty years since marrying Leslie, while Leslie doesn't appear to have aged a day.
We have two banal romances followed by a downer plot development and a futile attempt to put a happy face on everything in the end with more Chris narration seemingly from the heavens. I'm trying my best not to give away spoilers, but it is fairly obvious what must inexorably happen. 2 Hearts is innocuous and empty, without any meanness in its being, with a drawn-out setup which doesn't justify any emotional involvement later on.
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