If you make it to the end of “People We Meet on Vacation” — a movie that once would have slipped unremarked among its rom-com brethren on Lifetime — you will experience exactly the ending you expect. For fans of the movie’s source material (Emily Henry’s 2021 novel of the same name), that’s the good news; the bad news is the mountain of cliché you have to scale to get there.
Starting with the premise, which sees Poppy and Alex (Emily Bader and Tom Blyth), students at the same Ohio college, become friends during a rideshare and decide to reconnect every summer for an exotic vacation. (The see-you-next-year romance is almost its own subgenre.) She’s your standard movie free spirit, which means she talks incessantly, eats with the decorum of a ravenous 8-year-old and performs embarrassing dance moves in public. He’s supposedly a stuffy rule-follower, except — because he’s played by a rather engaging dramatic actor — he reads mainly as a quietly endearing adult.
Spanning 12 years and multiple flashbacks to unmemorable holiday high jinks, “People We Meet on Vacation” unfolds in vivid colors and mostly foreign locations. Along the way, Alex and Poppy — whose job as a travel writer reminds us how sharp Jameela Jamil can be, even in the minuscule role of Poppy’s boss — acquire and retire romantic partners and perpetuate the inane notion that getting soaked to the skin is some kind of aphrodisiac. Who doesn’t want to have sex while looking like a drowned rodent?
Occasionally cute and almost instantly forgettable, “People,” tidily directed by Brett Haley, offers less-than-witty dialogue (“You’re ripped!” “She wants to bang you”) and flyby turns by Alan Ruck and a typically excessive Molly Shannon as Poppy’s parents. It also leaves us with the veiled suggestion that a woman in love might happily exchange a big-city career for small-town coupledom. Now where have we seen that before?
People We Meet on Vacation Rated PG-13 for skinny-dipping with stoners. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
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