Set It Up (2018)

There is a school of thought that a romantic comedy earns its keep by refusing to innovate, and Set It Up enrolls in that school with the diligence of a tenure-track striver. Two assistants, Harper and Charlie, scheme to push their monstrous bosses into each other's arms so the bosses will have less time to ruin their lives. The machinery is old, the gears are visible, and the film knows it. Claire Scanlon directs from a Katie Silberman script, and the pair keep things brisk enough that we never linger long enough to resent the familiarity. It is a competent, agreeable, well-lit diversion, and there is no shame in that.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a study in restraint. The cast is notably multiracial for the genre, with Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs as the warring executives and Tituss Burgess lurking in the basement as a janitor with surveillance habits. None of it is announced. Race never becomes a subject, and nobody delivers a speech about it. The same goes for gender. Harper wants to write sports journalism and her editor is a woman running an empire, but the film declines to frame this as a thesis, which is either admirable subtlety or simple indifference. We report, we do not adjudicate.

The economic grievance is present but toothless. The bosses are wealthy, the assistants are exhausted, and the whole plot turns on the exploitation of the underpaid, which supplies a faint whiff of class resentment before the screenplay remembers it is a comedy and moves on. There is no sermonizing here, no climate lament, no revisionist project, no lecture. The film wants only to be liked, and it largely succeeds. A harmless confection, then, served at room temperature, and we record its mild cultural stirrings with the solemnity they do not deserve but which we are contractually obliged to provide.