Loves Kitchen

Though it seems to possess all the ingredients for a passable romantic comedy, Loves Kitchen has been infused with an aggressively subdued feel that effectively drains the viewer of their interest and ultimately cements the movie’s place as the cinematic equivalent of elevator music (ie its innocuousness eventually becomes oppressive). The familiar storyline follows Dougray Scott’s Rob Haley, an up-and-coming British chef, as he loses his passion for cooking after his wife tragically dies in a car crash, with the film eventually detailing Rob’s efforts at transforming a rundown pub into a full-fledged restaurant. (There are also subplots a-plenty sprinkled through the proceedings, including Rob’s romance with Claire Forlani’s snarky restaurant critic and an increasingly ominous threat from a would-be saboteur.) Loves Kitchen has been packed with a number of crowd-pleasing, comfortably familiar characters and plot developments, yet there’s simply never a point at which the narrative’s various attributes manage to cohere into a satisfying whole – as writer/director James Hacking employs an excessively deliberate pace that slowly-but-surely drains the life out of the proceedings. The passable opening half hour does, as a result, give way to a progressively interminable second half that’s overflowing with underwhelming and flat-out pointless elements, and there’s little doubt that the melodramatic third act is as tedious as one might’ve feared – with the sudden emphasis on the central romance essentially coming out of nowhere and smacking of desperation. (This is to say nothing of Hacking’s eye-rolling decision to trot out such hackneyed standbys as the fake break-up and the race to the airport.) It’s finally impossible to label Loves Kitchen – shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in there somewhere? – as anything more than a well-intentioned failure, which is a shame, really, as it’s clear that the movie could’ve (and should’ve) been a charming little romcom.

* out of ****