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Harriet (Lucy Boynton) is mourning the loss of her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet) in a car crash that also delivered a bonk to her noggin that allows her to whoosh back in time — but only when she hears a song that triggers a moment the couple had together. Thus the headphones; otherwise, the tunes streaming from supermarket speakers and other people’s car radios would have her constantly yo-yoing back and forth between then and now. The records she’s obsessively collecting are an effort to find the one song that might give her a chance to alter events and keep Max alive.
Does any of this make sense? Of course not. Time-travel romantic fantasy movies never make sense, and when they’re done right, that’s the source of their idiot charm. 2006’s “The Lake House,” which involves Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock and a magic mailbox, is a personal gold standard in this regard.
Complicating matters is that Harriet has met a cute guy at a grief counseling support group — that sentence alone announces we’re in Los Angeles — and is hesitant to open up and tell him about the whole trying-to-change-the-flow-of-history thing. David, who has lost both parents to either separate illnesses or just plain carelessness, is played by Justin H. Min, a likable actor who was the sensitive android of the little-seen “After Yang” (2022), a movie that you would be strongly advised to watch instead of this one.
What would it take to make “The Greatest Hits” work? For one thing, a music-rights budget that allowed for songs an average filmgoer might recognize, rather than tracks from the back 40 of Spotify or a disco remix of Roxy Music’s “To Turn You On.” For another, a script that avoids dialogue clunkers like “There’s a reason that in some languages, the word for love and the word for suffering is the same.” (I Googled it — didn’t find any.) Shopworn supporting stereotypes like the heroine’s sassy gay Black friend (Austin Crute) don’t help.
The prime offender, though, is writer-director Ned Benson’s inability to create three-dimensional characters, or even believable two-dimensional ones. Harriet is apparently a record producer, but we only know that from one dated reference to Alan Parsons and a brief scene of her telling singer Nelly Furtado to “add a little more compression on the drums”; otherwise, she’s an attractive blank space that Boynton strains too hard to fill in. The dead boyfriend, Max, is even more generic — a genial himbo with all the flavor of a catalogue model.
Benson made a stir with his debut, a three-film project called “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” (2014) that looked at a relationship from his, her and their points of view. His belated follow-up, by contrast, has barely enough personality for one. But he gets points for including the dreadful Kars4Kids jingle as one of the audio jogs that sends Harriet tumbling back in time — for a brief moment, the rest of “The Greatest Hits” seems much less irritating in comparison.
PG-13. Streaming on Hulu. Drug use, strong language and suggestive material. 94 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
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