Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Love Is In The Air’ on Netflix, A ‘You’ve Got Mail’-Style Romance About A Corporate Raider Who Falls For The Woman He’s Trying To Put Out Of Business (2024)

In the new Australian romance Love Is In The Air, out now on Netflix, Delta Goodrem stars as Dana, a seaplane pilot whose barely-scraping-by local airline is threatened when a brash finance guy, played by Joshua Sasse, threatens to shut it down and sell it for parts. It’s a classic tale of opposites attracting and everyone learning a lesson about the way the other half lives, but the movie never really takes flight beyond that.

LOVE IS IN THE AIR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman uses a radio to make an emergency call to a small seaplane, and then we see that plane flying over a beautiful stretch of Queensland, Australia.

The Gist: Dana Randall is a pilot played by Australian actress and singer Delta Goodrem (who, in the U.S. might be best known for having dated a Jonas brother a decade ago). Dana and her father Jeff (Roy Billing) run a small airline called Fullerton Airways that just barely scrapes by doing tourist flights, but the work Dana prioritizes doing is remote air support for locals; picking up residents who live in the surrounding islands and bringing them to the doctor, doing mail drops and other emergency deliveries. In that opening shot, Dana was making an unexpected emergency flight to save a dog that had been bitten by a snake, while a group of paying customers who wished for a sightseeing tour waited for her plane which never showed. See, when Dana’s father and mother (who is now dead) started this business, helping the locals was their bread and butter and though it doesn’t pay the bills, it’s a legacy Dana wants to protect.

Fullerton is financed by a London-based finance firm called ITCM. William Mitchell (Joshua Sasse) works for the company which is owned by his father, and they have a classic “Cat’s In The Cradle” relationship. To earn his father’s favor, (*Harry Chapin voice* “I’m gonna be like you, dad, you know I’m gonna be like you…”) William suggests a way to save their company money by selling off a small airline they finance, Fullerton Airways. Mr. Mitchell thinks this is a great idea (“My boy was just like me, he’d grown up just like me.” Sing it, Harry!) so he sends William to Australia to inspect the company and eventually dismantle it. William, who hates flying, seems to have hoped that maybe he could just be the idea guy and not have to actually travel across the globe to do the dirty work, but his father makes him go, and when he arrives in his crisp suit, he’s immediately a fish out of water.

William has only arrived under the guise of inspecting things, and he doesn’t let on that he plans to sell off Fullerton. Dana is wary of him anyway, and things between them are initially rocky: She hates businessy things and money, he is uptight and is very delicate in the heat, you get the picture.

To say that these extremes are obvious is to understate things: at every turn, some local yokel character is making sure William knows that Dana is a handful, a real piece of work, while William’s city-boy persona is ridiculously over-the-top when we see him struggle to pull a carry-on suitcase up one flight of stairs, bashing every step with the suitcase, rather than lifting it by the handle. “There are no elevators in God’s country, how do these people live?” William’s inner monologue seems to scream. And yet he begins to see that charms of the place, and realizes Dana’s commitment to serving her community is bigger than some business deal. He even stops taking his father’s calls because he wants to back out of the sale. (“When you coming home, son?” “I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then.” This review really relies on you all to have heard “Cat’s In The Cradle,” if you haven’t, please go take a listen, I’ll wait.)

Of course Dana eventually finds out William’s real motives for being there, but by that point, William has fallen in love with Dana and Australia and needs to find a way to earn back her trust.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Love Is In The Air is essentially You’ve Got Mail cruising at an altitude of 15,000 feet. He’s got big plans to buy out her independent little airline, she’s fierce and won’t be sold, and by the end, they fall in love. Meg and Tom walked so Delta and Joshua could fly.

Our Take: Love Is In The Air is essentially a Lifetime/Hallmark-style romance (it’s billed as a rom-com but, aside from having a plethora of supporting characters you can describe as quirky and exuberant, there’s no actual comedy to speak of) with a slightly higher location budget. The scenery is beautiful and integral to the story, with most of the film shot on location in the Whitsunday Islands in Queensland.

There’s chemistry between Sasse and Goodrem which all helps with the movie’s watchability, but you’d get very drunk if you played a “predict what will happen next” drinking game while watching the film based on familiar romance tropes. She’s hard-headed but lets down her guard! He worries about his designer shoes getting wet! She discovers his true motives for coming to Australia! He eventually stands up to his distant, cold father!

But nothing, not even the film’s climactic scene in which a cyclone hits the town and everyone has to hunker down together in the airplane hangar, adds and tension or originality to a story we’ve seen a million times.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Will, now working at Fullerton, walks across the tarmac to see a plane flying above. He looks up at the plane, and Dana, who is piloting it, looks down at him and the two smile at one another, and then the plane flies off.

Performance Worth Watching: As Dana’s best friend Nikki, Aussie comedian Steph Tisdell adds a handful of jokes to the script. It’s not much but she does her best with what she has in order to execute the film’s witty sidekick role.

Memorable Dialogue: The movie is filled with corny airplane-related puns and wordplay (right down to the title) and it’s clear the writers wanted to cram in as many as possible, but each time they do, the characters explicitly call out said puns. When Dana describes working with her dad, she says, “I wouldn’t have it any other way, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get turbulent sometimes.” In response, William asks, “That was a flying pun, wasn’t it?”

When Dana’s BFF Nikki advises her to stop focusing so much on work, she says, “You’ve got to put your feet ion the ground sometime, otherwise life will fly right by you.” Dana responds, “Have you been practicing that?” to which Nikki says, “Yes, in the mirror, its a pun about flying, it’s very clever.”

I do love a pun, but it’s clear the writers didn’t even try to to pull back the throttle. See what I did there?

Our Call: SKIP IT. To its credit, Love Is In The Air is perfectly pleasant. Also to its credit, it’s easily forgettable.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.