TMS Movie Review: The Life List
(Netflix)
While sometimes a story doesn’t necessarily need to be completely original to work, you do need to elevate it with a lot of execution in entertainment. One of my more anticipated films of this year is Celine Song’s romcom Materialists coming out this summer, which is a standard love triangle in a big city, but still looks like it has enough potential. Adam Brooks’ current romcom on Netflix this week, The Life List, is another standard love triangle in the big city—but doesn’t give us anything else on top of that, sadly.
In modern day New York City, Alex Rose (Sofia Carson), is shocked to discover her recently deceased mother, Elizabeth (Connie Britton), left a special note in her will that Alex can’t receive her inheritance until she completes an old ‘life list’ of goals she made when she was 13. In various discs Elizabeth filmed before dying, she explains to her daughter how she feels Alex has given up on making an effort and is just going through the motions; and has dug out the old juvenile list as a project for Alex to get her life on track before the year ends. Along the way, the grieving woman volunteers at a youth shelter and becomes attracted to two different businessmen, Garrett (Sebastian de Souza) and Brad (Kyle Allen).
(Netflix)
José Zúñiga appears as Alex’s estranged father. The Life List is adapted by Brooks from the best-selling 2013 novel with the same name by Lori Nelson Spielman. Unlike Marc Webb’s Snow White from last week—which is a disappointing film you can spend time explaining what it did wrong or could have improved on—The Life List is just very safe and predictable, in the same vein as later-day John Hughes or Garry Marshall. Interestingly enough, Brooks has a somewhat impressive resume that includes writing credits on Lawrence Kasdan’s French Kiss (1995), Griffin Dunne’s Practical Magic (1998), Richard Loncraine’s Wimbledon (2004), and his own directed Definitely, Maybe (2008). But again, this new picture proves that for whatever reason, romantic comedy directors fall off the hardest of any genre filmmaker. Carson is a decent lead [though indistinguishable from current ‘it’ girls like Jenna Ortega or Rachel Zegler], and both de Souza and Allen are fine as the two love interests. It’s also nice to see a romcom centered on adults in their 30s. But in the end, The Life List is going to be another basic fluff piece I’ll forget about by next week.