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Office Romance is a Netflix Romcom That Had Me Checking The Runtime
- Scarlett Davies
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
I was rooting for the premise, but the execution is another story
So I went into Office Romance with reasonable hope. The premise is very BookTok coded, which is why I gave it a shot in the first place.
JLo plays Jackie Cruz, CEO of Air Cruz, an airline she built with her father, played by Edward James Olmos, which is a full circle moment given they played father and daughter in Selena back in 1997. She runs a tight ship, including a strict no office romance policy for all employees.
Then Daniel Blanchflower arrives, played by Brett Goldstein, a grumpy British lawyer who is objectively overqualified for this job, cannot read the room to save his life, and falls for Jackie approximately four minutes after meeting her. HR would have a field day. I was cautiously interested.
The result is a nearly two-hour R-rated romcom that mistakes profanity for personality and crass humour for wit. It's not unwatchable. It's just deeply, frustratingly mediocre considering everyone involved.
TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿/5
What You Need to Know
Jackie is being sued by a rival airline over gate rights at Dallas Fort Worth airport. Her head legal counsel chokes on a sausage in a park and takes himself out of the picture entirely, which is genuinely one of the stupider subplots I've watched this year.
Daniel steps in, proves himself competent despite all evidence suggesting otherwise, and they fall for each other on a business trip to the Dominican Republic. The rival airline hires a private investigator to catch them together and use Jackie's own no-fraternisation policy against her. Things spiral. There's a press conference. Someone makes a speech. Love wins.
The structure is completely standard romcom architecture, and I have zero problem with that. What I have a problem with is the writing treating profanity as a substitute for actual comedy. Brett Goldstein and Joe Kelly wrote Ted Lasso together, which has some of the sharpest, most emotionally intelligent writing on television in the last decade.
Whatever happened between that writers' room and this screenplay, I genuinely cannot account for.
What Makes Office Romance Work
JLo is doing exactly what JLo always does, and that's not a criticism. She's warm, she looks incredible, and she commits fully to every scene, even when the material doesn't deserve it.
Her chemistry with Goldstein is genuinely there in the moments the script gets out of their way. There's a dinner scene in the Dominican Republic that works because it's two people connecting rather than two people delivering punchlines at each other.
Betty Gilpin as Sydney, Jackie's extremely pregnant and extremely boundary-crossing executive assistant, is the most interesting thing in the film and also the most uneven. When she lands, she lands hard. There are moments of genuinely sharp physical comedy that made me laugh. There are also stretches where the character is so aggressively over the top that I had to look away.
The mid-credits scene is worth staying for. Tony Hale as the HR manager, getting the full picture of what everyone has been up to, is the funniest the film gets, and it arrives after the film has already ended.
What Didn’t Work So Well
Daniel as written, makes no sense. He's a high-powered attorney from the UK who genuinely seems unaware that certain words are not appropriate in American workplaces. He acts like he's never been near an attractive woman before, despite being, by the film's own admission, a very good-looking and extremely accomplished person.
The cultural difference angle they're going for never lands because it doesn't read as cultural difference. It reads as someone writing a character from a country they've never visited.
The supporting characters are wasted across the board. Bradley Whitford ends up running a food truck and finding peace with himself, which sounds interesting and is not. Edward James Olmos shows up three times to say something meaningful and then disappears. Amy Sedaris is completely squandered.
The runtime is 1 hour and 52 minutes. It should be 90 minutes. There are entire subplots that exist purely to extend the film past its natural ending point, and they all drag.
My Final Verdict
Office Romance had every ingredient for something genuinely fun.
JLo as a powerful CEO, Brett Goldstein being grumpy and British, a workplace fraternisation plot with actual comedic potential, and a stacked supporting cast. The script wastes almost all of it. If you're a committed romcom girlie who can watch JLo in anything, you'll survive it. Everyone else, there are better ways to spend two hours.
What's your all-time favourite JLo romcom? Tell me in the comments because I need a palate cleanser recommendation.
