What is going on with Hollywood? Hollywood HDR is a fudging cancer. It means "destroy the image completely, turn off all the lights, and present the audience with moving shadows." Yet another movie that cannot be watched, because it's so insanely dark. Zero stars. Not a movie.

Given that so much of modern-day dating goes on online between people who have never met, nor ever intend to meet, the person they are courting, I had hoped this would deliver a more brutal critique of an industry that is predicated on shallowness, fickleness and downright lying, but it just didn’t do it for me. “Lucy” (Dakota Johnson) is the $80,000-a-year matchmaker whose job it is is to dress in over-sixes suits and to tick and reconcile as many boxes from each of her clients as she can then hope that when they do actually sit down in front of each other, they don’t take their fork to their own, or their date’s, eyes! She’s quite successful, indeed it is at the weeding for her ninth couple, that she tries to drum up business from those singles and divorcées impressed by her skills. She’s overheard by the brother of the groom (Pedro Pascal) who elicits from her that all she actually wants for herself is a man who has more money than God. He qualifies, but reckons she isn’t so venal and so embarks on a courtship ritual that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Jane Austin meets Julia Child story. Meantime, “Sophie” (Zoe Withers) is one of her clients who has a shocking experience and that proves unsettling for the hitherto uber-confident “Lucy” who might actually start to look at herself in the mirror and perhaps, just perhaps, not like what she sees. As if that wedding wasn’t momentous enough for the gal, she also runs onto her ex (Chris Evans) who’s a budding actor, a cater-waiter, and clearly still burns a candle for her. He hasn’t two pennies to rub together though, so what chance he can ever engage with her again? Whom will she choose? Whom (if anyone) will want to choose her? Why should we care? I’m afraid that I just didn’t. There are occasional moments of humour here, but for the most part it’s a rather toothless attempt to analyse the vacuousness of a business that could have been satirically analysed far more effectively if we hadn’t just been subsumed into an uninteresting melodrama with loads of foie gras, fine wine and a fairly torturous effort to add six inches… Pascal is classy and does enough and Evans can always get away with the boy-next-door look, but it all just reminded me of a soap. There’s far too much dialogue and nowhere near enough substance, and what looked promising at the start just fizzled into blandness fairly swiftly. Why is it that when people are fabulously wealthy, they buy such uncomfortable looking couches and never seem to have a television?

Contains minor hinted spoilers, read at your own risk. Dakota and Chris did the best they could to save the movie, it's an average movie but the case of Sophie seemed more like a plot device to move the story forwards with very little (only verbal) substance, i would have loved to see Sophie's story transpiring not only through dialogue but through action. That could have been a focal point to set the events into the next directions But overall, it was a good movie. The ending felt a bit rushed a bit and left ambiguous