Disclaimer: I’m a blind film critic, and this is available on Amazon with audio description.

Relationship Goals are good to have, but sometimes it can be rewarding to simply structure a film in such a way that it supports all the narratives in a perfectly tiered formula.For example, you have the ensemble films, like Love Actually, The Best Man, and Valentine’s Day. Each one puts together a hodgepodge of characters with different backgrounds and stories. The Best Man separates itself by being a romcom where the ensemble, while balanced, are all in the same narrative. We’ve seen this before, from The Big Chill and St Elmo’s Fire, but the film is structured always to support balanced narratives. Then you have the typical romcoms where the leads are the driving force, and the supporting cast are like concepts, or plot devices. If you look at a film like Sweet Home Alabama, it keeps it simple. A girl returns home to seek a divorce from her husband, which her current boyfriend doesn’t know she had, because she wanted to leave her rural life behind. She gets caught up in old emotions, complicating the love triangle. It never feels like Reese Witherspoon isn’t the lead, and from her romantic leads to the ensemble, everyone serves her story. The film never deviates into unnecessary exploration of the supporting cast. We don’t learn more about Melanie Lynskey’s character outside of her interactions with Melanie, and even more prominent supporting characters played by Candice Bergen and Ethan Embry are there to serve the greater purpose.

Relationship Goals is structurally unsound, making for a hodgepodge of ideas, as it tries to balance too many ideas, too many characters, and doesn’t just focus on our leads. Kelly Rowland and method Man are pretty good together, but the film is so distracted. I wish a film tangentially about journalism felt more engrained in it, like Broadcast News or Up Close and personal. It decides to also be a film where the leads have a past, so they bicker, and have to do the “we won’t, but you know we will” thing. They get lost in another character whose marriage is on the rocks, relying on faith, another one presumably on the rocks getting proposed to, and a book tour for a thing no one needs. Hell, even Dennis Haysbert doesn’t have time to impart enough wisdom.

This is a film all over the place, lost in a never ending stream of what if’s, that doesn’t spend as much time as it should making the plot between Method and Kelly feel worth investing into. I didn’t hate the fact that it had a lot of conversations about faith, but here it feels not quite organic. I was bored enough, distracted enough, and left empty just enough to say I can’t recommend this, but I also acknowledge had the ability to reign it in, and just focus on the primary couple, we’d find out those two could have carried the film. Instead, we got a blender of ideas, being wrapped up in a way that supports those relationship goals.

Ultimately there’s nothing memorable here, because the chemistry that has a spark in it, is nearly suffocated by a film that can’t decide if it has even a single goal of its own. Essentially just another forgettable streaming title, but one that isn’t bad enough to throw into the fire, but just messy enough to not be worth my vote or your time.

Kelly and method had potential as a romantic duo, but the film has a hard time giving them the space to do so.

Rotten: 5.6/10