Netflix's latest rom-com, Love Is in the Air, is everything a bad old-fashioned Hallmark-type romance needs to be – a mediocre movie with flimsy chemistry, travel-ad landscapes and generic life lessons.
Buy it or not, but there's no mistake about what is being offered here.
On her first movie role since 2005's teen comedy Hating Alison Ashley, Australian musician and former Neighbours star Delta Goodrem plays Dana, a pilot struggling to keep her family's business afloat in a corner of Queensland's Whitsundays islands.
Alongside her dad Jeff (Roy Billing) and airline mechanic Nikki (Steph Tisdell), Fullerton Airways helps connect the different islands in the area with essential services, from medical assistance to postal service.
Unfortunately, that's not a very profitable line of service, so their finances are sinking rapidly.
When their British finance company decides to shut them down for good, the boss decides to send his own son, William (Joshua Sasse), all the way to Queensland so he can learn how to make hard choices.
He expects him to follow his steps in the near future, so this feels like a test, one William is not so sure he wants to pass. Especially when he gets to Fullerton and meets Dana, a fearless woman who teaches him there are things more important than financial profit.
Unsurprisingly, the script is entirely predictable, as most enemies-to-lovers stories are. After all, the comfort of knowing how everything is going to pan out is one of the main appeals of this kind of deliciously fake rom-coms.
Still, having the male character adopting the classic "city girl" archetype is a welcome change, which basically makes the movie a gender-swapped version of some other recent Netflix movies like Perfect Pairing and Falling Inn Love.
The point of view – and desire – still belongs to the female character, though, as hollow as that perspective can be in this particular case.
Since Goodrem and Sasse wouldn't find sparks even if they used a flamethrower, viewers can find some magic in the gorgeous Australian scenery.
Filmed in long wide drone shots, it sometimes feels like we are looking at a travel commercial, which might be useful if you're looking for vacation ideas. Or, like the main characters, if you are considering a big life change.
If the landscapes are not enough for you to engage, there are also numerous painfully-unfunny flying puns, a dinosaur-sounding koala joke coming out of nowhere, and a cricket game sequence that escapes any logic or reason.
To make matters worse, John Paul Young's famous song doesn't even feature in the movie.
Actually, Love Is in the Air is not a reference to the song, but actually quite a literal title: here, love is found while flying across the sea, when two different people open their hearts while feeling the sea breeze and marvelling at dolphins jumping around underneath them.
At some level, being in the air like that also means taking a leap of faith, and that's what the characters are meant to do: William needs to accept that leading his father's business is not his dream, and Dana realises change is necessary for her family business to survive.
In the meantime, both need to be reminded that finding happiness is sort of the point of it all. As Nikki says: "You got to put your feet on the ground sometime, otherwise life will fly right by you."
We were not joking about the flying puns.
Love Is in the Air is now available to watch on Netflix.
Mireia Mullor
Deputy Movies Editor, Digital Spy
Mireia (she/her) has been working as a movie and TV journalist for over seven years, mostly for the Spanish magazine Fotogramas.
Her work has been published in other outlets such as Esquire and Elle in Spain, and WeLoveCinema in the UK.
She is also a published author, having written the essay Biblioteca Studio Ghibli: Nicky, la aprendiz de bruja about Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.
During her years as a freelance journalist and film critic, Mireia has covered festivals around the world, and has interviewed high-profile talents such as Kristen Stewart, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal and many more. She's also taken part in juries such as the FIPRESCI jury at Venice Film Festival and the short film jury at Kingston International Film Festival in London.
Now based in the UK, Mireia joined Digital Spy in June 2023 as Deputy Movies Editor.
