The Hating Game (2021)

There is a particular exhaustion that settles over the working critic when confronted with a film like The Hating Game, a 2021 romantic comedy in which two attractive publishing executives loathe each other across a shared desk until, at the appointed hour, they do not. Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell perform the required sparring with genuine warmth, and the film's defenders are correct that the chemistry carries what the screenplay cannot. Based on Sally Thorne's novel, the picture arranges its pieces with the tidy efficiency of a merger prospectus: a rivalry, a bet, a promotion, a wedding, a misunderstanding, a reconciliation. The machinery hums. Nothing surprises.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is thin and we should say so plainly. The supporting cast includes Sakina Jaffrey, Yasha Jackson, and Shona Tucker in modest roles, which grants the film a mild ambient diversity without ever asking the audience to think about it, and that is the extent of the cultural accounting. There is no engagement with race, no queer presence, no environmental conscience, no meditation on bodies or minds. Lucy does pursue professional advancement on her own terms, which registers as a faint feminist pulse, though the film's battle-of-the-sexes framing drew criticism for being retrograde, and the criticism was fair. The corporate merger and the thirty-five percent workforce reduction exist as plot mechanics, never as an indictment of anything.

What remains, then, is a light comedy that prefers banter to sermons, which is to its credit. It lectures no one. It has no thesis to impose, no audience to correct. The result is a film of modest charms and negligible ideological weight, the cinematic equivalent of a hotel lobby: pleasant, well-lit, and impossible to remember by the following morning.