Sometimes hate is just hate. I know. I know. We’re taught from the birth of our psychological understanding that the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference. This is true … to an extent. And, yes, sometimes those who hate are doing it to shield themselves from giving into their true affections.
However – and hear me out- sometimes hate is just hate. In fact, when you get to be an adult, this is truer than it isn’t. The dude who steals your mail? The dudette who shorts your hours at work? The person who interrupts you repeatedly? Odds are these people hate you. Odds are not that they secretly harbor such intense desire for your companionship that they lash out in negative ways. That’s not really what adults do.
And yet, here we are at The Hating Game.
This is definitely a COVID movie. You can tell from the office space that looks like a living room. Yup, 2021. I figured as much. This is the period when we could show people in offices together as long as they weren’t close. Lucy (Lucy Hale, and if you think this part wasn’t written with her specifically in mind, I have a bridge to sell you) and Joshua (Austin Stowell) are rivals coming from opposing ends of a merged publishing company. They occupy the same unpartitioned space in the office, and they sit on opposite sides of the room, facing each other, which is beyond awkward. Just wait until they’re both up for the same promotion; then you’ll see some quality adultin’.
And, sure, I know this is a romcom. (Do we think Lucy Hale is really capable of anything else?) But I get the impression these two actually do dislike one another. When you’re harboring a secret crush, you don’t yell at a person in a break room; you don’t send that person their work back with an entire page full of red corrections … or at least you don’t in the world of adults. Lucy plays the standard stereotypical romcom female: beautiful and brilliant, yet insecure and underrated. Josh comes off as anal, pedantic, and stoic. Yet, we can see he has a fun side because he condescendingly refers to Lucy as “Shortcake” (her parents own a strawberry farm).
The film works when Lucy pokes the bear, so-to-speak, replacing Josh’s post-its with *gasp* the wrong color and *gasp* rotating his desk stapler 85 degrees. These are nice moments. The times when 
they are screaming at one another? Less. And I have no idea how HR has not done something about their clear animosity.
One night Lucy has a sex dream about Josh and then an “only in the movies” thing happens – she lets Josh know she had a sex dream. Cuz, yeah, that’s what you share with co-workers you hate. And then to bluff her way out admitting the dream featured Josh, Lucy deliberately sparks a relationship with a less desirable suitor.
Yeah, this is stupid. Really, really stupid.
The Hating Game is predictable and tedious. And just when both parties have figured out they like one another, the film puts up artificial barriers. Geez, for people who work in a communication industry, you guys suck at communicating. But that’s irrelevant. What we have here is a Christmas-type romance set -not at Christmas- (or at least not all at Christmas. This is good in that I don’t feel obliged to pen a Christmas Box for this gag gift of a film, but the good ends there. I see a fair amount of Hallmark in the future of these two leads.
There once was a woman named Lucy
Who envisioned a dream quite juicy
But the subject, sadly
Was an office frenemy
Would be better were she not the seducee
Rated R, 102 Minutes
Director: Peter Hutchings
Writer: Christina Mengert, Sally Thorne
Genre: “She loves me …”
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Anybody who has a Hallmark Channel preset
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Adults
