Under a Lover's Moon

The female character is a control freak who gets dumped by her high school sweetheart just before getting married. He (but not me) thinks he made a mistake and travels towards their former honeymoon destination in order to Change her mind. I considered giving a 5 but refrained from that impulse given that it's ending offers some hope for future improvement.

Romantic TV movies don't need to be pretentious or deep, but they do have to amuse you and make you feel better at the end. This one doesn't do either.

The lead actress is plain awful. Her character (Ava) is annoying from the very first minute. Not quirky, not relatable, just annoying. Self-obsessed, judgemental, dominant, childish, superficial, neurotic.

The supporting characters aren't much better. Really no idea why the two guys (Brett and Kyle) are fighting over her except for stupid masculine pride or testosterone maybe. Run, boys, run!

Examples of the very poor writing: she falls asleep on a airbed in the swimmingpool. She falls over and doesn't seem to wake up or try to get out of the pool. Not believable at all. Both male leads are trying to build the highest pile of sand in a contest and the winner gets to take her out. Really? And due to a misunderstanding Ava and Brett broke up when they were in high school, but apparently he didn't bother to clear that up when they got back together and got engaged.

It's filled with cliches. Usually that's quite acceptable - there are only so many ways to tell a love story - but somehow that irritated me in this movie.

Not worth your time, unless you want to get annoyed.

I desperately wanted to like this movie. I love the main actress, Rebecca Dalton, but even she couldn't save the character she was playing. Her character as written was one of the least likeable female rom-com personalities I've ever seen...and I've seen a LOT of rom-coms.

At base, she's a control freak. Now this in itself isn't a horrible problem, it's been done enough in rom-coms that it could even be considered a trope: "Control freak learns to loosen up and relax". The problem is...she never changes. When you start with an unlikeable character you need character growth in order to show they've changed into someone likeable. There simply isn't any character growth to be found in this movie. Even in the last scene, she's STILL manipulating the male lead and forcing him to do things he's uncomfortable with and doesn't want to do.

This is compounded by the fact that she's not "oh it's a cute over the top rom-com" kind of controlling. She's honestly kinda creepy manipulative "no one in their right mind would put up with this insanity" kinda controlling. I don't want to have to spoiler tag this review so I won't go into specifics, but a central theme of the interactions between the two leads is being better at communicating. While the blame/ownership of the bad communication is placed entirely on the male lead, good grief was that not the case at all. Her character could teach a master class on gaslighting...

5.5 stars would be exactly average. This is definitely below average, so I went with 4 stars. It's a 3-star movie, but I bumped it up 1 because of the lead actress. She played the character as it was written well...but that was the problem.

My husband and I started watching this movie, but the female lead was so annoying that we had to turn it off. She was self absorbed and terrible. Usually there is a redeeming quality somewhere that you can see that makes you want to watch and see if she comes to some realization of how she needs to change, but we couldn't see any positive in her at all if I can't root for the main character, I can't enjoy the show.

Curious what resort was the setting for this!?

Really not worth watching! Lead actress was beyond annoying!