Delayed Reaction: Meet Cute

Premise: A woman with access to a time machine decides to relive the night of an amazing first date over and over again.

I love time travel and time loop movies. It's my favorite writing cheat: redoing the same scene to note the effect of minute differences or changes. When a movie does it right (About Time, Palm Springs), I eat it up. However, it does mean I hold these to a higher standard. When one of these movies doesn't totally work, my disappointment is more severe than it should be.

 

Take Meet Cute. This is a perfectly decent time-travelling RomCom. It's a Peacock Original, so there's an assumed level of quality there. And getting Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson as the leads is a win. This movie just never got going for me. I never bought into the time loop. The movie starts well into Sheila (Cuoco) doing the time-travel thing, so there's an imbalance right away with her and Gary (Davidson). The movie hinges on the date that she's reliving to be so magical that we'd believe she wants to keep reliving it. Already though, we're seeing her getting bored by it and fracturing the allure. The most interesting part of the story happens before the movie starts. I'd've loved to see that first date and what led her to deciding to relive it. Just watching a dozen ways that Sheila acts crazy isn't that alluring.

 

There are two proven ways to make a time travel movie work. Either give the protagonist a reason to want to get it right or give them no control about the time travel. In About Time, I'm willing to watch Tim relive the same moments because he's sincerely invested in getting the moments right. In Palm Springs, Nyles' boredom makes sense because he has no way out. Neither of these apply to Meet Cute. The revelation that Sheila is depressed does a lot of heavy-lifting to explain why she wants to keep reliving this night. It never feels like she's trying to make the night better. In fact, the entire movie, it's like she's trying to find new ways to ruin the night. Late in the film, it introduces the Butterfly Effect potential of going further back than that one night, but it is so underexplored that I don't know why they introduced the idea at all.

 

Meet Cute is a movie I should've like a lot more, and knowing that seems to have ruined the experience. This is an idea with limitless potential and most of it was squandered. I wish I could say that Cuoco and Davidson's chemistry carried me through it, but they are on such unequal footing for so much of the movie that I never felt a spark. The basic beats of this pretty short movie are easy enough to lean on, but it never found a way to get any investment from me.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend