French Kiss stars Meg Ryan as Kate and Kevin Kline as Luc, whose chemistry ends up being one of the film’s few highlights.
French Kiss follows Kate as she gets over her fear of flying to go to Paris and confront her ex-fiancé, while meeting a stranger who changes her point of view on life.
This will be one of my shorter reviews, but here is my thesis statement: a boring drag that is only somewhat saved by some good chemistry between Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline.
Okay, first off, this movie feels like it goes on for three hours instead of two. The movie starts off with Kate as she tries to overcome her fear of flying to go to Paris with her fiancé. But after he ends things with her, she just gets on the plane and goes to Paris almost like it’s no trouble. To be fair, Luc does distract her to calm her down, but we could have used a scene of her hesitating to get on the plane or looking for excuses not to board. It feels too rushed and comes across more as a quirk of the character rather than a meaningful character beat.
Luc and Kate do have a fun back-and-forth dynamic, but that only goes so far before you need to add something new to it. Without that, it gets boring fast. Their chemistry is still there, but the audience loses interest. By the time they inevitably get together, after Kate tries to win back her ex-fiancé and realises Luc is her true love, the audience has lost emotional attachment to them as characters, so the resolution doesn’t feel earned.
We also spend so long on Kate trying to reunite with her fiancé, building up the audience’s anticipation for an emotional climax, only for the movie to undercut it. Luc tells Kate not to go for a big third-act moment and instead play it cool, which is solid advice, but it tampers with audience expectations without offering anything equally satisfying in its place.
Also, on a side note, Prime Video and other streaming apps need to fix their subtitles. When a movie is primarily in English but includes other languages, they often don’t subtitle those parts properly. We went through all the settings, but nothing worked. So with a movie that’s at least one-third in another language, you’re not able to fully follow it, and you can’t be as invested in the plot or characters.
Overall, all these factors make the movie drag and feel like you’re wasting your time rather than being entertained. I was considering giving it one star for the genuinely good character moments between Kate and Luc, but it’s hard to care about them when the story feels this slow. These reasons and more are why I’m giving this movie a half star out of five. If it focused more on tightening the story (and if the streaming service fixed its subtitles), it would have been a better experience, but as of now, it’s just… boring.
French Kiss stars Meg Ryan as Kate and Kevin Kline as Luc, whose chemistry ends up being one of the film’s few highlights.
French Kiss follows Kate as she gets over her fear of flying to go to Paris and confront her ex-fiancé, while meeting a stranger who changes her point of view on life.
This will be one of my shorter reviews, but here is my thesis statement: a boring drag that is only somewhat saved by some good chemistry between Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline.
Okay, first off, this movie feels like it goes on for three hours instead of two. The movie starts off with Kate as she tries to overcome her fear of flying to go to Paris with her fiancé. But after he ends things with her, she just gets on the plane and goes to Paris almost like it’s no trouble. To be fair, Luc does distract her to calm her down, but we could have used a scene of her hesitating to get on the plane or looking for excuses not to board. It feels too rushed and comes across more as a quirk of the character rather than a meaningful character beat.
Luc and Kate do have a fun back-and-forth dynamic, but that only goes so far before you need to add something new to it. Without that, it gets boring fast. Their chemistry is still there, but the audience loses interest. By the time they inevitably get together, after Kate tries to win back her ex-fiancé and realises Luc is her true love, the audience has lost emotional attachment to them as characters, so the resolution doesn’t feel earned.
We also spend so long on Kate trying to reunite with her fiancé, building up the audience’s anticipation for an emotional climax, only for the movie to undercut it. Luc tells Kate not to go for a big third-act moment and instead play it cool, which is solid advice, but it tampers with audience expectations without offering anything equally satisfying in its place.
Also, on a side note, Prime Video and other streaming apps need to fix their subtitles. When a movie is primarily in English but includes other languages, they often don’t subtitle those parts properly. We went through all the settings, but nothing worked. So with a movie that’s at least one-third in another language, you’re not able to fully follow it, and you can’t be as invested in the plot or characters.
Overall, all these factors make the movie drag and feel like you’re wasting your time rather than being entertained. I was considering giving it one star for the genuinely good character moments between Kate and Luc, but it’s hard to care about them when the story feels this slow. These reasons and more are why I’m giving this movie a half star out of five. If it focused more on tightening the story (and if the streaming service fixed its subtitles), it would have been a better experience, but as of now, it’s just… boring.
