Falling Inn Love Synopsis: When city girl Gabriela spontaneously enters a contest and wins a rustic New Zealand inn, she teams up with bighearted contractor Jake Taylor to fix and flip it.
After losing her job and breaking up with her commitment-phobic boyfriend all in a week, Gabriela Diaz (Christina Milian) spontaneously and drunkenly enters a contest to win a cute inn in New Zealand. The next morning, she wakes up, and ta-da! She’s won the inn. Deciding to sell the inn and use the profit to start over, Gabriela travels to New Zealand, where she finds the inn needing a massive renovation. It’s also inhabited by a goat named Gilbert.
Gabriela gets to work and quickly realizes she cannot do all the work alone. The townspeople of Beachwood Downs rally around Gabriela to help her achieve her dreams, including hunky handyman/volunteer firefighter/beekeeper Jake (Adam Demos), who finds himself drawn to Gabriela after spending years mourning his high school sweetheart.
Falling Inn Love is the kind of fluff that one usually sees on Hallmark or Lifetime. It’s also a bit dull and painful to watch. I was not thrilled with the script. There was so much in this movie that had no basis in reality (I know, but bear with me). Gabriela enters a “win an inn!” contest one night while drunk on wine and then literally wakes up the next morning to find she won. Renovating a decrepit inn into something more environmentally friendly and high-tech at seemingly no cost to her, thanks to the generosity of practically everyone in town.
Falling Inn Love’s antagonist is a chipper, two-faced inn owner named Charlotte (Anna Jullienne) who wants to own the Bellbird Valley Farm to cut down the competition before she has any. I’m not sure why Charlotte didn’t buy the inn at any time before the owner decided to put it up in a contest. Maybe I missed her motivations while I was questioning my Friday night choices.
Falling Inn Love hits so many rom-com cliches, and I have said before that I don’t mind the cliches if they’re executed right. Unfortunately, there was not one thing I enjoyed about this movie beyond the adorable goat. Okay, and it was lovely to look at the beautiful scenery. The end result of the inn’s incredible rehabilitation had me craving a trip to New Zealand and finding an inn similar to the Bellbird Valley Farm to spend the week at.
But Falling Inn Love also boasts some pretty bad acting and over-acting. The dialogue is cringe-worthy, and the supporting characters are cartoonish. I love strong, independent heroines, but it loses something when she’s unnecessarily rude and has to exclaim that she “doesn’t need saving” to prove some point to someone legitimately trying to be helpful rather than misogynistic or condescending. Demos is a fine actor, but Jake felt bland and too perfect to be interesting. Even if a romantic comedy is trash, I’ll still find some redemption in it if the two leads are worth watching together, but there just wasn’t a lot of chemistry between Demos and Milian.
There is really no actual conflict either, no matter how hard the movie tries to convince us that there is. We do not doubt that Gabriela will find her happy ever after. The journey there feels contrived, more so than most rom-coms. Very few make me groan, and very few bore me, but Falling Inn Love did both—another disappointing rom-com attempt by Netflix.
Watched: 10/04/2019
Notable Song: Make Up My Mind by Maya Payne
