Terry Ingram

(On TV, August 2021) I’ll give a shot to any Hallmark romantic comedy if the premise has a good hook, and food-related premises are one of the most reliable ways to get me to tune in. In Just Add Romance, we find ourselves in a fantasy world of a cooking competition in which two ex-flames find each other again, and encounter various obstacles on their way to a happy ending. Narratively, there isn’t much going on here: true to form, the film is intensely predictable from the get-go, two leads are already nuzzling each other by mid-movie and the only suspense during the third act is to wonder which contrived crisis will temporarily emerge to extend the film’s running time. You mean only one of them can win the first prize required to open a restaurant?! I hope they eventually realize they can collaborate as a couple! Disappointingly enough, the cooking aspect of Just Add Romance is treated as an afterthought — there isn’t much cooking here, and the cooking competition runs on clichés almost all the way through. The leads are likable without being particularly memorable (another Hallmark convention finely upheld) and neither the writing nor Terry Ingram’s direction are anything special. It’s not much in terms of a movie, but it’s certainly watchable while doing other things. Miss five minutes? Not a problem — you don’t even have to rewind to see what you’ve missed. A film menu can include empty calories.