I’m not gonna lie. I didn’t have Brett Goldstein down as Future Hollywood Romantic Lead on my stand-up bingo card. But here he is, starring opposite Jennifer Lopez in Office Romance, which ticks all the classic romcom will-they-won’t-they? boxes and then lobs in a few soccer, sorry, football, in-jokes for UK viewers. I wonder who the writers are. Oh, Brett Goldstein and Joe Kelly.
Goldstein plays Daniel Blanchflower (spot the football reference), a top lawyer who finds himself handling a heavyweight case defending airline CEO Jackie (Lopez) when her usual legal eagle chokes on a breakfast burrito. Daniel and Jackie clearly hit it off - in fact he gets what I believe Americans call a ‘boner’ when they meet in her office.
The only trouble is that company policy is that inter-employee relationships are a no-fly-zone, so they have to keep affairs on the down-low. Even when Jackie flies Daniel on her private jet to a sun-kissed island for a business meeting (is it just me who gets Jennifer Lopez and Penelope Cruz confused? Is the airline being called AirCruz another sidebar gag referring to this?
Anyway, you can kind of guess how things work out, but not before various mishaps including an unexpected birth in the office and a Richard Curtis-style cross-town dash. Goldstein is good as the buttoned-up Brit, and you can just about believe him as someone who spends his time-off swotting up on law books. Whether you can believe Jackie being a closet Anglophile who has a secret shrine to all things English at home is another matter, but it maybe explains why she is charmed by Daniel.
The result, directed by Ol Parker, is a pretty mainstream outing which at times seems to be catering just for British Ted Lasso devotees, complete with Harry Kane shirt on the wall and jokes about Jude Bellingham which may well go over the heads of most Americans. The only major scuffed shot is that when Daniel is watching football at home he is watching a Spurs game. He must be a sucker for punishment. Oh and Jodie Whittaker plays Daniel's sister Lizzy, who is banged up for murder - he seems to have moved to the USA just to look after her, certainly not to look for love.
Don’t tune in expecting any surprises, but Lopez is on good form and Goldstein does well as a kind of Brit Ben Affleck, even if he doesn’t seem to know what to do with his arms at times. I can’t say the film gave me a boner but I certainly didn’t doze off either.
Office Romance is streaming now on Netflix.
Picture: Netflix
