On its face, Relationship Goals is a classic romcom, calibrated for viewers of a certain generation. The perennially resplendent Kelly Rowland is Leah, a boss babe morning TV producer in line to replace her retiring boss (the omnipresent Matt Walsh) as showrunner. Just as she\u2019s poised to break the glass ceiling, the network higher-ups stick her in a bake-off with Jarrett, a ringer from her romantic past played with devil charm by Method Man. The promise of one of Destiny\u2019s Children playing the will they\/won\u2019t they game with the hunk of the Wu-Tang Clan could well prove too strong a lure to stop the scores who grew up on their music from clicking on the Prime Video thumbnail just out of nostalgic curiosity.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a tractor beam made stronger by director Linda Mendoza\u2019s extraordinarily fast pace. I mean, those 90 minutes just breeze by. Relationship Goals\u2019s three-headed writer team \u2013 led by Michael Elliott, whose credits include Queen Latifah\u2019s Just Wright and Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s Carmen hip-hopera \u2013 are bracingly efficient with their paint-by-numbers set-up. Leah\u2019s besties \u2013 Treese, the tragically single makeup girl (Flamin\u2019 Hot\u2019s Annie Gonzalez); Brenda, the wistful morning anchor (A Black Lady Sketch Show\u2019s Robin Thede), Roland, the omniscient assistant (Pose\u2019s Ryan Jamaal Swain) \u2013 helpfully fast-talk through backstory points and punctuate scenes with snappy one-liners and winks at the audience. (Brenda titles her emergency engagement plan: Project Put a Ring on It.) Only Dennis Haysbert slows things down as Leah\u2019s grieving father, but not enough to be a drag.<\/p>\n
The film\u2019s genre and millennial-coded winsomeness make it easy to forgive its purposeful misunderstanding of how TV news works. (Two New York City producers up for a top network job got a three-week deadline to nail a Valentine\u2019s Day puff piece? Come on, cupid, be for real.) And a soundtrack, that whips from Victoria Mon\u00e9t to the Doobie Brothers and ends with a duet from the leads called Complicated, helps us forget about the truly mortal danger Leah puts Jarrett in to ensure their cliched airport denouement via an empty bomb threat. (\u201cI\u2019m tryna cater and Spotify you with baby makers,\u201d Johnny Blaze spits in a word salad line that, at the very least, explicitly makes clear where listeners can stream the track.) It\u2019s only after you\u2019ve watched the trailer and committed to the feature that you realize that this PG-13 experience is actually meant to be a faith-based film for women who may be spending Valentine\u2019s Day alone.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Its true star is Michael Todd, a rising star in a new generation of prosperity gospel-hawking sneaker preachers<\/a>. This film takes its title from his bestselling book \u2013 which, among other things, delivers homilies about dating with intention while likening women who don\u2019t as \u201cchicken nuggets\u201d.<\/p>\n This movie has been seen before. Fourteen years ago, Family Feud\u2019s Steve Harvey spun his relationship manual into the blockbuster Think Like a Man franchise and was roundly criticized for smiling as he reheated old-school misogyny \u2013 or \u201cthe toxic butthole of patriarchy\u201d, as Leah might call it. TD Jakes, the Oprah- and Diddy-approved<\/a> megachurch leader has been spinning his bestselling polemics into film allegories about feminine submission for years (So it\u2019s no surprise to find one of Jakes\u2019s screenwriters, Cory Tynan, on this).<\/p>\n Todd is deeply embedded in Relationship Goals: the characters venerate him as an expert. Leah and Jarrett make him and his wife, Natalie, the principal subjects of their Valentine\u2019s Day puff piece, which plays twice. They make a pilgrimage to Todd\u2019s Tulsa, Oklahoma-based megachurch for Sunday service \u2013 and not necessarily to tee up Method Man for an off-key rendition of Keyshia Cole\u2019s Love in a road trip sequence, or for Rowland to wash away her sins against cinema in Tyler Perry\u2019s Mea Culpa<\/a>. Stripped of its nostalgic familiarity and romantic frustration, Relationship Goals is no better than an extended infomercial for Todd\u2019s ministry produced by DeVon Franklin, another canny sneaker preacher who nested his pulpit in Hollywood ages ago.<\/p>\n