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I love Horror-Comedies. I always have, ever since I saw Army of Darkness when I was, like, twelve years old. The only thing that can improve Horror is adding in some laughs, and I typically eat those movies right up.
But what about a Horror... ROMANTIC-Comedy? How would that even work?
Well that is what the new movie Heart Eyes sets out to investigate. Can the blending of all these disparate elements really work together?
Heart Eyes tells the story of Ally, an advertising worker who is about to get canned for her disastrous new commercial line-up. Jay is the new hotness brought in to undo her mistakes and get the parent company back on track. The two had a chance meeting earlier in the day, and now they find themselves forced to work together. On Valentine's Day! Will sparks fly between them?
Oh, and in the meantime, there is a masked serial killer on the loose who strikes on the holiday for lovers by killing happy couples. When the Heart Eyes Killer sets his sights on Ally and Jay, can the latter two survive his wrath?
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
+ This movie lives and dies on the chemistry and likability of Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding. And thankfully they are excellent in their roles and as a pairing. Whether they are on screen together or separately, they absolutely shine. I never would have imagined the fourth best member of Scream's "Core Four" could be so engaging, but make no mistake, Gooding is more like Greating as Jay in Heart Eyes.
That was really bad, sorry.
They really do simmer when on screen together, though. They play through so many of the Romcom tropes (more on those in a second). They go from Meet-Cute to rivals to friends to couple on the run from a killer to lovers. You wouldn't enjoy this movie at all if the leads didn't have a brilliant chemistry. And again going back to Scream: I never thought much of Gooding's pairing with Jenna Ortega in Scream 6. But in Heart Eyes, he really met his match in Holt.
And speaking of Holt, she actually has more heavy lifting to do that Gooding does, as she is the central protagonist. There are several scenes with Holt but not Gooding; there are only a handful of moments with the inverse. So she is often carrying the picture on her own in the early going, and she does a stellar job.
+ The genre bending and genre blending is incredibly creative, and it adds a fun wrinkle that I don't think the slasher sub-class has seen yet. Swaths of the movie go by playing as a typical romantic-comedy, and you could be excused for forgetting there is a slasher villain on the loose after our heroes. Ally and Jay have a very stereotypical meet-cute, complete with bumping heads to pick something up. Then Jay is found out to be the person brought in to replace Ally on a project at work. Then the two go out to dinner together to try to hash out their work stuff. It's all very tropes-centric.
Until its isn't! And the killer starts striking out after them! But even through that, we get adorable moments of Jay and Ally falling for each other. It's so cleverly written, and that's exactly what I expect from one of the co-writers, Christopher Landon. He of such movies as Freaky and Happy Death Day is in his usual form here. All through the movie, the romcom elements emerge, again allowing Gooding and Holt to showcase their talents. This is really a beautiful blending of writing and acting.
To say nothing of the solid direction of Josh Ruben, another talent I've long been a fan of with his comedic work on Dropout and his previous films Scare Me and Werewolves Within. I knew he was the architect of this outing which was why I was so keen to see it opening weekend. He served up probably his best movie to date.
- The movie has a perfectly fine ending and resolution, but then it just... keeps going. It felt like they didn't know when to stop. I'm going to play into this in our Second Down, so let's hop directly over to that one...
- And to add a Down entirely related to the previous one, the reveal is pretty weak, even when played for laughs at parts like it is. It was highly predictable and still felt unearned.
Overall, the third act of Heart Eyes starts really strong with [what feels like] a climax set at a drive-in where our protagonists accidentally lure the killer to a date night locale full of lovers for him to slaughter. And by the end of this segment, the movie feels well and truly like it's ready to close out, only for another reveal to come out of nowhere and keep the plot chugging along. Then we have ANOTHER climax, this one set in a church.
I'm not sure if the writers ran out of steam on their initial plot and then decided to throw another twenty pages into the screenplay or what, but the fake-out ending/not-ending took a movie I was loving and made it start feeling the slightest bit tedious. I think my emotions peaked and broke over the pseudo-resolution, so it was hard to get back up for another go-'round.
And in that segment we get some killer reveals we didn't really need, and what's worse is that they were entirely predictable reveals. One in particular features a character introduced earlier in the film about whom I said "Oh, that's going to be the killer" as soon as they appeared. So I guess I felt let down that a screenplay that had been so strong for about eighty-five minutes weakened in its last fifteen.
OVERALL
I won't lie; I loved Heart Eyes. And even though the last twenty minutes or so was a downer, all that did was take this from a four-and-a-half down to about a four (let's call it four-and-a-quarter). For the vast majority of its runtime, this flick is a blast of smashing together two cinematic archetypes that have no business being mixed together. But it just works on virtually every level.
🍿 = SCORE: 85 / 100
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