Love, Guaranteed (2020)

Love, Guaranteed arrives from the year 2020 carrying a premise so modest it nearly apologizes for itself: a Seattle attorney takes on a client who wishes to sue a dating website for failing to deliver the love it advertised. Rachael Leigh Cook plays the lawyer, Damon Wayans Jr. plays the client with a thousand failed dates behind him, and the two of them fall for each other in the orderly fashion such films require. It is a pleasant, frictionless object, the cinematic equivalent of a lukewarm bath.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the film is nearly a blank slate, and it seems content to remain so. The romantic pairing is interracial, and the supporting cast is mixed, but nobody remarks upon it and no thesis is advanced. A woman practices law and a woman runs the corporation she opposes, which the film presents as a fact of the world instead of an argument about it. The lawsuit gestures at corporate overpromising, though the target is a dating app and the remedy is a settlement, so the critique never sharpens into anything resembling an indictment of capital. There is no environmental sermon, no meditation on the body, no neurodivergent arc, no engagement with history real or revised. The film wants only to be liked.

The result is a romantic comedy that argues nothing and proposes nothing. It offers two decent people tumbling into fondness, and it does so without a single moment of sermonizing. For audiences seeking to be lectured, this will be a disappointment. For the rest of us, it is a harmless way to pass ninety minutes, and the classification ledger closes accordingly.